


The Escape Van

by oneclicklater



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Drama, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2019-11-19 06:12:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18131993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneclicklater/pseuds/oneclicklater
Summary: From a prison courtyard, Dipper Pines tells the story of a redhead he once fell in love with. (Wendip.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I never know what to write here. I guess... hello? Before you start reading, please note that this story contains mature themes that younger or more sensitive readers may find upsetting. If you're at all concerned, I will be happy to tell you what those themes are via PM (does AO3 have PMs? I don't even know), but only once we've reached that point in the story.
> 
> There are 8 chapters, which I will be posting once a week, on Saturdays. Hope you enjoy it!

On the highest bench of the spectator gallery, overlooking the baseball diamond, the rusted workout equipment, the black, metal tables, and finally the concrete wall, topped with barbed wire, Dipper sat. He sat and he thought about nothing in particular. From up here, he had the best view of the outside in the entire compound, and yet he had never seen any other inmate take advantage of the position. They didn't know about the view or they didn't care for it. Perhaps they didn't think of the outside like he did; perhaps they were accustomed to their lives within the wall. Content, even. Dipper tried to come up here at least once a day.

Over the wall, an unmarred stretch of grass led to the edge of the low cliffs. Beyond that, the ocean, adjoining the entrance to Coos Bay, and on the other side of the bay, the hills, coated in pine trees, rolled on and on until the state border. Occasionally a ferry would pass, and Dipper would try to make out any feature he could of the people on board, their faces unreadable in the tiny windows. He would wonder where they came from, make up their backstories. And here, on a clear afternoon like today, if he tilted his head up, squinted against the setting sun, it was easy to imagine that he wasn't here at all. It was easy to believe he was back on the beach that surrounded the lake in Gravity Falls.

He heard a _clang_ below him and looked down to the bottom of the bleachers. Mitchell Lewis, the closest friend (or the closest thing _to_ a friend) that he had come by throughout his incarceration, was climbing the benches, his boots against the metal disrupting the tranquility. "Thought I might find you up here," he said. He sat down on the top bench, two yards across from Dipper, went into his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. He flipped open the box, held it out, and Dipper shook his head.

"Since when?" Mitch said.

"Shit'll kill you."

"Ain't never stopped you before."

"Yeah, that was when I thought I had nothing to live for."

"And you got something to live for now?"

"Yeah. Always have. Just didn't realize it."

Out the corner of Dipper's eye, Mitch studied him for a minute. Then, he lit his cigarette, took a long drag, leaned back and cast his eyes over the courtyard, the ocean. He was forty-seven years old, well-built, brown-gray spiky hair, a neat beard. He looked more like he belonged on the set of an action movie than in prison, apart from the missing tooth. He was in for murder. Life sentence. In a white tank top, no jumpsuit, the tattoo on his bicep was visible – a painfully generic red heart with an arrow through it. _Worst mistake I ever made_ , he once told Dipper, without a trace of irony.

"A family?" Mitch asked.

Dipper said nothing. A speedboat exited the port, its drone audible from the courtyard. Five people were on board. Two of them kids.

"A girlfriend? Hell, a _boyfriend?_ Gimme somethin' to work with, here."

Dipper was about to answer, actually, but he waited a microsecond too long.

"Shit, Bigfoot." Mitch kicked at the concrete stands and shook his head, pointed his cigarette at Dipper. "I ain't never met anyone as _ungrateful_ as you. I been leading your ass around this shithole for _eight_ years and you ain't never repay me. You think about that? You ever tell me shit about your life outside the clink? Hell no. I told you every last gory detail 'bout mine."

"Yeah, I wish you hadn't."

"Well what the fuck else am I gonna do all day? Sit up here by myself countin' the clouds? My back straight as an arrow?" He slapped Dipper's back. "We talk, we trade stories, that's what we do, else we go insane. We tell stories how we ended up here."

"I don't see the point in dwelling on things that I'd rather forget."

"Well tough luck, buddy. You done somethin' that deserve eight years, you ain't gonna forget it. They make sure of that." A long drag, a cloud of smoke, the wind carrying it to Dipper. "Man, all those stories you stay up writing in your little notebook, you ain't never thought to write something 'bout your own damn life? Somethin' real? You gotta put down your _mem-rahs_."

"Memoirs."

"S'what I said."

The speedboat, a speck on the horizon, fully disappeared. In truth, Dipper could go days without thinking of the people that once mattered most to him. Thinking of where they were now, how they must have changed, it only made confinement feel infinite. The time passed slower, even slower than it usually did within the concrete walls, while the boats sailed by, full of people growing and changing at a natural pace. "I have a twin sister," Dipper said.

Mitch had the cigarette at his mouth, but he lowered it. "Holy fuck," he murmured, and then glanced around frantically. "Is this it? Should I get comfortable?" He jumped up on the bench and yelled out to the courtyard, "y'all listen up! Bigfoot here's gon' tell his life story! Never before heard. _Ex-clusive_."

A pair of inmates out on the picnic benches turned their heads and stared for a long time, a standard reaction to Mitch's eccentric behavior. They shook their heads and grumbled something, then returned their focus back to a game of dominoes. 

Dipper looked up. "Are you gonna let me tell the story are you gonna be an asshole?"

"Alright, alright, alright." He dropped back onto the bench. "So, you have a twin sister. What's her name?"

"Mabel."

"Mabel. And what's she like?"

"She's like... she was my best friend. Wouldn't ever hurt a fly."

Mitch nodded. "Uh-huh. And you hurt her?"

"I hurt her time and time again." Mabel's face broke into his mind. Smiling. Rosy cheeks. Long, brown hair, curled at the end. He imagined her in her house down in San Francisco – she had shown him the pictures – but what if she didn't live there anymore? What if her face had changed, or she'd cut her hair? It had been five years since he'd last seen her. More painful than the image of her was knowing that the image may have been inaccurate.

"We'd just graduated high school," Dipper said. "It was the end of summer and there was a house party, to say goodbye to the people who were going away to college. Mabel and I both went. And we were there till late. I remember a lot of people had left already."

***

He had been drinking, drinking enough that he needed to stick to the outside of a room so he had a wall to lean on, keep himself upright. He nodded his head to the music and swigged from his cup, unable to focus on any particular detail of the room but aware there must have been less than twenty people left in here, all in a similar state to him. He wasn't talking to anyone but that was fine, he was at a point where he wanted the night to roll on longer, he didn't want to go his bed and shut out the light and let the sobering silence creep in, even if there wasn't anything to do here. Not just yet. He smiled and watched Sheri Sykes and Amelie Nicholson dance, the only ones dancing. They were both straight, but they teased the room, their hands on one another's hips and their foreheads pressed together. Sheri bit Amelie's lip and they both broke into laughter, Dipper did too, always careful to react the way that people expected him to. He took another drink.

Everything was fine one minute, and his blood was boiling the next. He happened to look away from the girls, towards the entryway, and saw that Doug Tanner was leading Dipper's sister up the stairs, by her hand. She glanced behind her, smiling nervously, but didn't see Dipper. The rumors that had circulated the halls were months old – right after prom – but now Dipper heard the hushed voices clearly, in his head. 

_Nobody else was there but I bet he did it. I always knew there was something creepy about him._

He set down his drink and stepped around a group of guys. One of them called his name but he ignored them, he moved to the foot of the stairs and checked over his shoulder. Nobody was following him.

_How have you not heard about it? It's 'cause you don't have Facebook, you fucking hermit. Cindy, dude. She said that Doug drove her home after prom but he parked up by the side of the road and locked the doors. He was drunk as shit._

In a more level-headed state, Dipper might have cupped his ear to the doors to listen, ensure he had the right room, but instead he bust open random doors and issued a slurred apology to the girl on the phone, the couple making out, and an empty bathroom.

_She's saying he raped her._

End of the hall. Only door he hadn't tried. Doug had his sister down on the bed. Doug's shirt was unbuttoned and Mabel's was on the floor. The light from the hallway was a strip from floor to ceiling, perfectly centered on their startled faces. It was quickly occluded by Dipper's shadow as he staggered across the carpet.

"Dipper?" Mabel shrieked. She grabbed a pillow to cover her belly. "What are you doing? Get out of here!"

Doug saw what was coming and backed up, but he was too slow, and Dipper's fist sailed into his cheek, knocked him back against the wall. Dipper grabbed the collar of his shirt and kept him pinned, spat as he spoke. "The fuck are you doing, Doug? One girl not enough for you? You're gonna go after my sister as well?"

Doug's expression turned from mild irritation to fury. "You fucking psycho," he grunted, and shoved Dipper backwards with strength that Dipper's foolhardy mind had not anticipated. And then his ears were ringing, head spinning, he was down on the floor, and he heard something crack, and Doug's fists were raining on him, until Mabel tackled Doug to the ground. He wrestled out of her grip and stood, stumbled to the doorway, his shirt still open, slipping off his right shoulder. He turned back and said, "you're both fucking crazy," and slammed the door shut on his way out. 

Mabel scrambled to her feet and knelt at Dipper's side, tilted his face up so he could see her. He could taste the blood spilling from his mouth. His nose felt like it had been removed, put through a blender, and glued back on. Mabel whimpered and, in spite of everything, hit him in the chest, called him stupid. So, so stupid.

Miraculously, no lasting damage, except for the relationship with his twin. They didn't talk about that night until a week later, when the lacerations on his face were almost fully healed. It was a Monday morning, the last one of summer. He sat at the kitchen table, sipped his coffee, laptop open. Mabel came in wearing her robe, didn't say good morning because they didn't do that anymore. She shuffled around in the kitchen. Dipper didn't pay attention. She was probably making toast. But then, she sat down opposite him. Her hair was still frizzy, unkempt from bed, and she folded her arms on the table and glanced out the window like Dipper wasn't there, so he went back to his laptop, didn't say anything.

"I don't know what you were thinking," she said.

He looked up, over his screen. Her eyes met his, now. She stared like they were old friends who hadn't seen each other in years. 

"I don't know what _you_ were thinking," Dipper said.

She shook her head. "He didn't do it, you know."

"How do you know?"

"How do you know that he did?"

"I prefer to err on the side of caution. Like, yeah, maybe that shark swimming around out there in the water _doesn't_ bite people, but I'm not going to dive in and try to play with it."

"That's stupid."

"It's a perfect analogy, actually."

"If everyone thought like that, Dipper, his whole life would be ruined, don't you understand that? If everyone believed Cindy without a doubt, Doug would go the rest of his life with everyone around him hating him, staring at him, talking behind his back. Do you know how hard that would be?"

Dipper leaned back in his seat, incredulous. "And what if Cindy's sitting at home right now, crying? Crying because she'll never be able to trust a man ever again? What if she's been sitting at home all summer, feeling _violated,_ and Doug's been out driving around with his friends, and they're all backing him up, including you. They're saying 'we know you didn't do it, Doug, we got your back, man.' How the fuck do you think that would feel for her?"

The tension on Mabel's face dissipated. Her eyebrow twitched. "He didn't do it. He wouldn't."

"Really? How many more times do you think he would have punched me in the face if you hadn't stopped him?"

She picked at a fingernail, red paint chipped and fading away. She didn't look at Dipper, didn't even acknowledge that she'd heard him talk, but then she raised her hand to her mouth, glanced sideways out the window, and started to cry. They sat in silence for five minutes at least, before she next spoke. "Did you take your medication that day?"

He exhaled through his nose. "Yes." When she said nothing, "go upstairs, count them," he said. "You know where they are."

"No, I believe you. But... Dip, there _has_ to be another way for you to deal with it–"

"I know." He brushed his hair out of his face and scratched his forehead. "I'm trying."

She reached across the table and took his hand. "I know you are. I just worry so much that if you're violent with the wrong person, you're gonna get yourself killed."

"Well, that's what this move is gonna help me with, right? All that... 'country air' that Mom's been talking about."

"We've got a lot of good role models up there, too." 

"I don't think you can call Stan a good role model."

"The other ones." She smiled, wistful. "I hate that I'm not gonna be around to look out for you."

"There's still time to drop out and come with me."

Mabel cocked her head.

"Kidding," he said.

***

A week later, Dipper tied his belongings to the bed of his maroon pickup and headed north to a town called Gravity Falls, Oregon. Before he left California he took an exit and stopped at a Denny's for coffee, thought about getting lunch, but his appetite disagreed. He sat by the window, his elbow rested on a sticky patch on the table, and he thought about the distance he had put behind him. Distance from his parents, which he was fine with, but also from his sister, the one person he relied on to keep himself grounded. At the same time he understood that that reliance wasn't healthy for either of them, that this distance was necessary. There was only so long she could put aside her own evenings to sit on the floor in his room and talk to him, comfort him, tell him he wasn't a monster. This distance was necessary. He would have time, now, all the time he needed to put school behind him, delay the choices he needed to make about the next stop in his life, wherever that would be. Time to find peace of mind. He set down his coffee, half full, suddenly eager to get back on the road. He paid at the counter and waited a beat until the waitress stepped away, then he put down a twenty and hoped she would look up out the window and smile as he drove off.

Nostalgia drowned him in waves when he took the exit off the I-5, past the welcome sign, the water tower, the diner, into the town he'd spent his summers at, up until the age of sixteen. Nothing had changed, nothing at all, as if it existed in its own pocket of time, nobody from the outside ever coming in and nobody from the inside ever leaving. He knew that wasn't far from the truth. 

His great uncle, Stan, rose from the couch on the porch of his house as Dipper pulled into the parking lot, tires kicking up gravel. Dipper killed the engine and hopped out. His uncle clapped him on the shoulder, hard, and went straight for the ropes tying Dipper's stuff down to the truck, never a man for hellos or goodbyes. 

***

"Yeah?" Mitch said. "And then what?"

"Well, Stan's house doubled up as a semi-popular tourist attraction called the Mystery Shack. He let me live there rent-free so long as I helped him out with his business. I worked in the gift shop, mostly. It was like, um, one of those weird-ass museums that doesn't really teach you anything, just a random collection of stuff that's fun to look at. Like something you'd see in Disney World."

"Do I look like I ever been to Disney World?"

"When I came back I was thinking business would be slower, especially 'cause I'd never worked there outside the summer months, but, apparently there was a whole host of families from all over the state that liked coming back every now and again, enough to keep the place running."

"And what? You wanted to inherit the place for yourself? Force the man into early retirement? Get him with a pillow in his sleep, make it look like an accident?"

Dipper turned away from the sunset and glowered at him. "You waited eight years for me to tell this story, and you can't even sit still for ten god damn minutes while I set it up for you?"

"Hey, man, story's gotta start _strong._ Gotta rope me in. Gotta be full of action from the start."

"Yeah, well, this isn't that kind of story."

"What kinda story is it, then?" 

In his mind's eye, he was working the counter at the Shack, but then he was playing the crane game in the arcade at the bowling alley, walking down to the lake, eating steaks up at Lookout Point. "It's a story about a girl." Lounging in bed on the summer afternoons when he wished the sun would never set. Driving into the night, fast, heart racing. Switching off the headlights. Sitting. Waiting. "And how I ruined her life."


	2. Chapter 2

She was as beautiful as he remembered. Mowing the front lawn of her dad's log cabin, black tank top, faded blue jeans, ripped at the knees, her hair loose, and red, and wild. He smiled to himself and carried on up the dirt road that acted as her driveway, until he was seeing her fully, not through the trees. She looked up, pausing her up-and-down pattern, and her mouth went wide and she grinned and left the mower running, strode over the grass she hadn't cut yet and shouted, "what the fuck, stranger?" She threw her arms around his neck, one of those bear hugs he always loved. When she let go she brushed a strand of hair out of her green eyes, scratched her cheek, messy with freckles. "The hell are you doing here?"

"I live here now," he said.

She punched his shoulder. "Get out. Since when?"

"Since yesterday."

"And you didn't think to tell me?"

"I'm telling you right now."

The door of the cabin swung open and out walked her dad, onto the porch. He was a stocky man, to say the least, a thick red beard down to his chest, owner of the lumbering company, responsible for deforestation across town. He set down a can on the wooden railing – Budweiser – and called out, "hey, Wen? How about you shut that damn thing off if you're gonna stand around and yabber with your friends, huh?"

Wendy stepped back and switched off the mower, the woods around them returning to its natural peace, birdsong, leaves rustling in the wind, not an engine or car horn to be heard. "Dad, you remember Dipper? He's just moved back to town." She stood at the foot of the porch steps and motioned for Dipper to come closer, but truthfully, he feared the man bending down and taking a bite out of his head.

Dan – that was his name, Dipper remembered – tilted his beer out toward him. "How you doin', son."

"Hello, sir. Good to see you."

"Sir? My crew don't even call me sir. You call me Dan or Manly Dan, those are the options."

_Manly Dan._ Dipper almost laughed. If they were on the set of a porno, maybe then he'd call him that. Wendy looked back at Dipper and pointed her thumb out to the driveway. "You wanna go get a drink or something?"

"Yeah, of course."

"I'll finish the lawn later, is that okay, Dad?"

He gulped his beer, crushed the can in his palm and tossed it into a metal bucket stationed by the door. "So long as it's done by dark," he said, retreated into the cabin without another word.

Wendy squeezed Dipper's arm for a second as they walked back along the driveway. "It's so good to see you, man. How long's it been? Two years?"

"Three years. Last time I was here, you were still in Denver."

"Right, right. Yeah, um, I'm guessing you heard about that."

"Yeah." She had studied at the University of Denver for a year and a half, but dropped out. Majored in Law. Dipper remembered reading the paragraph about it she had posted on her Facebook page, how he went to type out a reply and decided against it, because if they hadn't texted for a year that must have been for a reason. The same doubts bounced around his mind not five minutes ago, walking to her house, but they'd settled once she'd welcomed him with open arms. "College isn't for everyone," he said.

"Is that why you're here? For college?"

"Nah. The opposite, really. I do want to go, I just don't know where. Or what to study. I'm gonna work in the Mystery Shack while I figure it out."

"Smart. I wish I'd done it that way. Instead I'm twenty-thousand dollars in debt with nothing to show for it."

"You don't have to pay that back right away though, right?"

"No," she said. "If I did, I wouldn't be here. I'd be a skeleton on my bedroom floor. Starved to death."

They crossed the main road, stepped over a wide crack in the middle, and started along the woodland trail that led into town. It was the same route he had sometimes walked alone to Wendy's house in the summers, after coming out the bowling alley or the movie theater, his friends and his sister teasing him as they went their own way, him blushing, muttering under his breath that he wasn't in love with Wendy, that his friends were assholes. He would get butterflies walking up her driveway but she was always happy to see him, or at least acted like it. She would grab two root beers out the fridge and they'd go to her room and play her Xbox until the sun set and their eyes were sore. 

"So you're working with your dad now?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah. Not working with him, so much, but with his crew sometimes."

"That'll explain the, uhh–" he reached out and squeezed her biceps.

She flexed both her arms. "Cool, right? This is from chopping firewood out behind the cabin, though. We sell it out of our backyard now, which is great in winter, but in the summer I do more shifts at the bowling alley. I work there, too. We used to deliver firewood door to door, actually. We made a lot of money off people who lived out in the woods, especially old people. But Dad had to sell his car to pay Kevin's hospital bills."

"What happened to Kevin?"

"Broke his leg playing soccer. And then the other leg six months later."

"Ouch."

"Yeah."

"What about your van? Couldn't you use that?"

"Oh, I sold the van right before I went to college. I couldn't afford rent in the city otherwise."

"You sold the van? Oh, man. You loved that thing." It was a Volkswagen painted in the pattern of a red and black flannel, and when she drove it, she always wore her matching shirt, while half of her personal belongings rattled around in the back. She used to park it up at Lookout Point and sleep in it, sometimes in a sleeping bag, sometimes on the floor, using a shoebox as a pillow.

"I did love it," she sighed. "But, you know. Whatever. Life goes on."

They came out of the woods and onto Main Street, and Dipper peered into the windows of the local stores and businesses, the floors clean and the shelves tidy and the owners as tired as he remembered. It was boring to look at, depressing if you thought about it too much, but at least Main Street was pleasant. The same could not be said for Skull Fracture, the biker bar around the corner, just out of sight of the church.

Wendy pointed a thumb at the door, asked, "you wanna get a drink in here?" as if there were other options further up the street. No, if you wanted a drink, you went to Skull Fracture, and you asked for something strong, not something fruity, and you sat down and you shut up and you tried real hard not to look anyone in the eye for more than a second, lest they take it the wrong way and assume either that you wanted to fight them or fuck them, and both of those ended in pain. But it was 2 P.M. on a weekday, so only the rock-bottom alcoholics were inside, and they weren't drunk enough yet to be friendly but they weren't drunk enough yet to be mean, either, and Dipper ordered a Diet Coke despite the bartender openly reminding him that _we don't ID here, kid,_ and the only questioning glance came from Wendy.

"You don't want a beer?" she said, popping the cap off her Budweiser on the edge of the bar, worn away from years of people doing the same thing.

"Nah," he said. "I'm trying not to drink anymore."

He was grateful that she didn't ask why. She took a swig, half the bottle, and they sat down in a booth on the empty side of the bar, the clack of billiard balls distant, heavy metal playing over the speakers. "Fuck that," Wendy said. "When you're as unambitious as I am, drinking gets you through the day."

"What do you mean?"

She hunched her shoulders, white bra strap peeking out from under her tank top. "I'm twenty-one and I live with my dad, working two jobs that won't ever take me anywhere." 

"I think that's more common than you think."

"Maybe. How's Mabel?"

"She's good. She's studying Drama in Irvine starting next week."

"Yeah, she told me about that. We still talk on Facebook sometimes. She sounded really excited about it."

"Yeah, she is. I mean, it's Mabel. She gets excited when the mailman comes up the driveway."

Wendy laughed but Dipper couldn't, because now he was thinking about his sister clearing out her bedroom, sweeping their childhood away, driving to her dormitory with their parents in the car behind, her suitcase propped up in the passenger seat. 

Wendy reached across the table and put her hand on his, laced their fingers together. "It's gonna be hard being apart from her, huh?"

***

The sun was in his eyes, now, and Dipper's gaze drifted away from the water, down at the baseball field, the grass between bases erased from years of prisoners running around the diamond, some because they wanted to, some because there was nothing better to do. "I knew right then that I was still in love with her," Dipper said.

"Shit," Mitch said, and flicked his cigarette, landing somewhere among the bottom benches. "This ain't gonna have a happy ending, is it?"

"You thought the story of how I ended up in prison was going to have a happy ending?"

"I don't know if I'm gonna be able to handle this. You're gon' tell me this chick was an angel and you killed her."

"I didn't kill her, Jesus Christ."

"But you hurt her."

"I didn't hurt her, not like that. I never laid a finger on her. I wouldn't."

"So what did you do?"

"Mitch, come on, man. Shut up and stop interrupting and we'll get there faster."

"Alright, alright. Go on."

"I was in love with her but I didn't tell her. We were just friends, and I think I was okay with that. A lot of her high school friends had moved away and I barely knew anyone in town, so we hung out a lot. When days were slow at the Mystery Shack I drove over to the bowling alley, and then she spent a lot of evenings in my uncle's house. She'd worked at the Shack before, actually, so it was kind of like a second home for her already. Then, everything changed on New Years' Eve. Her dad was friends with Stan, from like, way back when. We had their whole family over at the Shack – Wendy, her dad, and her three brothers, Marcus, Kevin, and Gus."

***

There was an open field adjacent to the Mystery Shack that Stan had, in years past, used to host an annual carnival, which had never quite complied with health and safety regulations but was always a highlight of any teenager's year in Gravity Falls. It brought every kid in town together for a day, which was a recipe for melodrama – for instance, you would see your ex walking around hand in hand with the asshole from the bottom of your street so you'd wait until they headed for the ferris wheel and you'd slip into the queue ahead of them, hop on the car in front of them, wait until they were kissing, and then you would spill your drink over the railing and soak their hair in orange soda. Dipper had his first kiss up on that ferris wheel, and the following year he _almost_ lost his virginity when Kara Herring led him by the hand into the surrounding woods and they lay down on a bed of dirt and leaves, but Dipper kept hearing twigs snap and raising his head like a meerkat to check that nobody was watching, and Kara got tired of that and told him to get off her and stormed back to the carnival, buttoning her shirt up.

Stan threw another bundle of kindling on the bonfire, and for a moment the flames were taller than any of them. Marcus was talking to Dipper about college and Dipper nodded along, but his eyes wouldn't stop drifting to Wendy. The hair hanging down to her chest was glowing orange in the firelight and the embers twirled in her eyes. Her dad had one gigantic arm draped around her neck, his palm tapping her shoulder to the beat of the song on the radio. They were talking at a low volume, smiling. It was ten minutes to twelve; soon the local DJ would say a few words about how little had happened this year in his own life and indeed the life of Gravity Falls, and then he would launch into an unenthusiastic countdown to midnight.

Wendy looked over at Dipper and broke into a warm smile, the freckles on her cheeks reshuffling. She slipped away from her dad's grip and came around the fire, took Dipper's arm and rubbed his biceps through his sweater. "Come inside with me for a minute?" she whispered, and Dipper's heart didn't jump because Wendy had always been touchy-feely, and flirtatious without meaning to be. He had no reason to consider that tonight might be different.

As they walked away from the warmth of the fire and toward the light of the porch, her dad called out, "Wen, where you going?"

"We're just getting a drink," she called back.

"We're lighting the fireworks at twelve. Don't be late."

"Okay," and then, under her breath, "your highness."

In the kitchen she grabbed a beer from the fridge and pointed along the row of sodas, until Dipper nodded at the root beer. She passed him the can and said, "I don't know about you, but I'm watching the fireworks from the roof. I'm not going back out there tonight. When my dad gets drunk he's either aggressive or mushy, and tonight he's gone with mushy."

"Oh. I thought you were having a good time."

"I am. I'd just rather not be around when he starts weeping about how much he misses my mom." She took a swig of her drink and winced. "That was mean. Of course he misses her. It's been _so_ long, though. He says he sees so much of Mom in me, but he needs to find somebody else to do his laundry and cook his dinner."

"That," Dipper said, "is misogynistic."

"How's that misogynistic?"

"You're suggesting that basic responsibilities like cooking and cleaning fall to a woman."

" _I'm_ not suggesting that. My dad is suggesting it, when he tells me to do his laundry and cook his dinner."

"Oh."

"Yeah." She stepped forward and prodded Dipper's chest. "Smart-ass."

He took her hand, cold from holding the beer. "Come on," he said, and led her up the stairs and the ladder to the roof.

Only part of the roof was flat, but it was big enough for the two of them. It was unlit save for the moon and it overlooked the woods, dead quiet. The field and the bonfire were behind Wendy and Dipper, hidden by the peak of the roof. Later they would turn around and look up to watch the fireworks. They sat side by side, not touching, but their feet sometimes bumping when Wendy swung her legs.

"You got any New Year's resolutions?" she asked him.

"I have two," he said. "I want to write more. At least two hours a day."

"Awesome. I love reading your stories."

"You mean you love it when I read them _to_ you."

"That's the same thing."

"It isn't, but okay."

"What's the second resolution?"

"I need to find a girlfriend," he said. "You know, someone to do the laundry and cook dinner."

She went to hit his arm but he dodged it and laughed. "Be serious," she said.

"I am serious. Not about the cooking and the laundry, obviously. I do want a girlfriend, though. I guess you could say I have a hole in my heart that only romance can fill."

She scoffed. "If romance is involved, I think you're screwed."

"Excuse me? I'm _extremely_ romantic."

"Yeah?"

"Of course."

"Where do you take a girl on a first date?"

"The sewers."

Wendy laughed and shook her head. "The sewers."

"Yeah, think about it. A walk in the sewers by candlelight. If you can woo someone in a sewer, you've wooed them for life."

"You're disgusting."

He took a sip of his soda and set it down on a level tile, leaned back on his hands. "What about you? What's your resolution?"

She shrugged. "I didn't have one, but I guess I should get a boyfriend too. It's been a while. Maybe we can matchmake for each other." She gazed out into the dark, and Dipper was quiet, his eyes on the back of her head. She turned around, tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled.

"I mean, there's an easier way we could solve that problem," Dipper said.

"What problem?"

"That we're both single."

The smile vanished from her face and reappeared, as if deciding he was joking. She turned her attention back to the black mass of trees and said, "you don't want me."

"Why not?" He sat forward again, tried to meet her eyes. "You don't know what I want."

"I know that I'm too old for you, for one thing."

"I'm eighteen. We're three years apart. That difference doesn't mean shit anymore."

Again she looked back at him, her face softer, almost nervous. Dipper couldn't remember the last time he had seen her confidence shaken, if ever. Her eyes flitted to his lips and back up. "I'm not into sewers," she said.

"I know." He ran his fingers along the rough tiles until they grazed her hand, and then he picked it up and held it. "You're into long walks around the lake and lying by the fire. You're into heavy metal concerts and horror movies. You like going back to bed in the afternoon and pulling the covers up over your head. I could join you for any of those things."

She was close enough now to whisper. "I lie around in bed in the afternoon because I'm lazy."

"So am I."

"I'm also moody and difficult."

"I know. It's weird how that makes you more attractive."

She kissed him, one hand weaving its way into the curls of his hair and the other gripping his shirt, pulling him closer, a surge of warm breath released from her nose. While he massaged her back and she explored his hair, their lips didn't part once for a full minute, the kiss deeper with each passing second, until their tongues met and Wendy thrusted forward. She shifted one leg to climb onto Dipper's lap but she slipped on a tile, and Dipper opened his eyes and held her still until they were sure they wouldn't fall off the roof. She glanced at the black void below them and laughed through her nose, then their eyes met again, and they both stood, their arms still entangled. Wendy backed up to the slanted roof, leading Dipper by the hand, and she leaned against it and he leaned against her and they continued where they left off, Dipper eventually moving to her neck, indulging in the subtle scents of her body – vanilla on her skin and apple in her hair – the things that were impossible to pick up on when they were more than a few millimeters apart.

He heard the whistle of a firework bound skyward, and then the crackles and bangs overhead were loud enough to startle them every time, but they remained intertwined, lost in one another's touches and tastes. Dipper knew that hundreds, maybe thousands of moments just like this one were happening right now along the West Coast, but none of the people wrapped up in them were as ecstatic as he was, none of them were more deeply in love with the person they were kissing than he was. He was sure of it. 

Wendy tilted her head down and their lips were separated. She pressed her forehead to his and as another firework went off, a flash of purple struck her cheek, then green, then red. "Come to bed with me?" she breathed.

They descended the ladder, and crossed the landing to Dipper's bedroom, the moonlight through the single window sufficient to guide them across the wooden floorboards to his single bed in the corner. Wendy sat down and Dipper jumped onto the mattress and then she was hovering above him, crawling on her hands and knees like a lion creeping up on its prey. She clawed at the buttons on his shirt and he lay still, not knowing what to do with his hands. When his shirt was open, she placed a cold palm on his chest and ran her fingernails down to his belly, scratching it slightly, and that was all the invitation he needed to lurch forward, meet her lips again, and be as rough with his hands as he craved to be. Eventually they changed places, Wendy on her back and Dipper pressed against her, and he cupped her breast through her shirt and she stiffened below him.

Dipper pulled his hand away and pushed himself up to look at her. "Sorry," he said. "I thought–"

"No, it's okay. You can."

It hadn't occurred to Dipper until now that Wendy might want him to be gentle, because, well, it was Wendy; she had a punching bag in her bedroom and she chopped wooden planks with her forehead. "Can I take off your shirt?" he said, and she nodded, raising her arms as he lifted it over her head. Underneath, a red bra and an expanse of skin that he'd seen before at the pool, but now it was right in front of him, in his reach, and she didn't mind that he was trailing a finger up to her chest. He dipped his head and kissed the fleshy skin at the top of her breast, used a finger to lower the cup of her bra, and for a moment Wendy panted, hot, heavy breaths that told him he was pushing all the right buttons, but then he felt it again, her muscles tensing under his touch. 

She scooted backwards, up against Dipper's pillow, and groaned.

"Sorry," he said again, and swallowed. "Am I doing it wrong?"

"No, no, it isn't you. It's me. I'm sorry. I thought I was ready, but I... can we take this slow?"

"Of course. Of course we can."

"Sorry." She glanced down at his bare torso. "I know I led you on."

"No, you didn't. If you're not ready, I mean, Jesus, I'm happy with anything, Wendy. I'm happy just being near you. You have no idea how long I've wanted to– to– um." 

There was no way of saying it without sounding perverse, but she bailed him out. "Me too," she said, and smiled and held out her hand. "Do you want to lie down for a little bit?"

He took her hand and they lay down, facing one another, the bedding bundled up beneath them. For a while they said nothing, just stared into each other's eyes like lovesick teenagers. Dipper tucked strands of her hair behind her ear and ran a thumb across her freckled cheek.

"Happy New Year," Wendy said.

"Happy New Year," he said, but the very mention of it made his stomach sink. The year ahead was now paved with uncertainty. "This isn't one of those... one-night things, is it?"

Her smile faltered. "So you think I'm a slut."

"What? No, I–"

"I'm kidding." She stroked the stubble on his chin with her fingertips. "I don't think it's a one-night thing. Do you?"

"I hope it isn't."

"Why don't you meet me at the diner tomorrow for breakfast? Then it won't be a one-night thing. In fact, why don't you bring your car, and then afterwards we'll go park up at the lake and make out for a few hours? Then it _definitely_ won't be a one-night thing."

"That sounds sublime."

Some time around twelve-thirty Wendy said they should go back downstairs, so they put on their shirts and kissed a few times in the doorway, reluctant to pause what they had started tonight. When they stepped outside, they could see that the bonfire had been extinguished, and Stan and the Corduroys were just entering the light cast from the porch. Stan had a devilish look about him. "What have you two been up to?" he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and only then did Dipper realize how awkward it was to come face to face with Wendy's family moments after she had been in his bed.

Wendy's boots clacked against the porch steps as she joined them. "We were just talking," she said. 

Stan came up on the porch and bumped Dipper's shoulder, and Wendy walked toward the parking lot. Her brothers followed, taking no notice of Stan's comment or of Dipper's glowing red cheeks – they had never been a perceptive bunch – but her dad stood still, silent, and Dipper couldn't look the man in the eye so he said, "goodnight, Dan," and swiveled on his feet and stepped back inside.

As the door swung closed, "'night, son," Dipper heard him say.


	3. Chapter 3

They spent a lot of time in the attic of the Shack, lying in his bed or on the floor, tangled together with blankets, the TV providing background noise, playing a horror movie they had lost interest in or idle on a video game menu. Some Saturdays Dipper would roll over and reach up to the nightstand and check his phone and it was five P.M. already, he hadn't done anything productive all day, and usually that would stress him to the point of a headache but now he didn't mind, because Wendy was fast asleep beside him and he could wrap an arm around her waist and bury his face in her hair, and she would sigh, half-asleep, and reach her hand back to touch his cheek. They didn't spend nearly as much time in Wendy's bedroom – Wendy's two youngest brothers still lived at the cabin, and she said that the walls were thin and her brothers didn't understand the concept of privacy, but Dipper suspected the main reason she kept him away from her house was her dad.

Dan Corduroy had made it clear that he wasn't happy about Dipper dating his daughter, though Dipper couldn't understand why. He no longer nodded or raised his beer from his chair on the porch when Dipper came up the driveway, and any conversations Dipper tried to start with Dan were riddled with brisk responses and a general lack of interest. One morning Dipper saw Wendy in the grocery store and they got to flirting, leaning on the deli counter, and Dan came around the corner with his cart and interrupted them, said he was in a hurry to get home. It was as if the man came from a different era entirely, a time when women were not deemed smart enough to think for themselves or choose their own boyfriends, and fathers chased anybody who dared touch their daughters down the driveway firing a shotgun into the sky. Wendy assured Dipper that it wasn't personal. "I'm his only daughter," she said. "He's protective of me."

Their first real date was dinner and a movie in White City, the next town over from Gravity Falls, and at the end of the night when Dipper made the turn into the Corduroys' driveway, Dan was standing at the far end of it, to the side of the cabin. Dipper switched to his low beams, and the man was engulfed in darkness for a moment until Dipper came to the end of the drive and stopped the car, and Dan was still standing there, arms folded, as if he had decided in the last few hours that his calling in life was to become a tree. Dipper wanted to laugh but held back – Dan didn't have much of a sense of humor – and he looked over at Wendy for an idea of how to react, but she didn't seem fazed. 

"How long has he been standing there?" Dipper murmured. He had told Dipper to have Wendy home by eleven, and it was ten-thirty.

Wendy merely rolled her eyes. "Like I said – overprotective." She leaned over the center console and kissed him, said "goodnight."

"'Night."

As soon as Wendy's feet touched the dirt, Dan turned and walked to his front door, Wendy trailing behind him. Dipper felt a surge of anger course through him. "Asshole," he muttered, and swung his pickup around, careful not to drive up on the edge of the immaculate front lawn.

He brought it up with her the next day, kneeling on the wooden floor of the gift shop, unpacking a box of Bigfoot bobbleheads and pricing them with the label gun. Wendy was sitting on the checkout counter, swinging her legs, her boots making a dull thud every time they hit the wood. "That was weird last night, wasn't it?" Dipper said. "The way your dad just stood there. He looked like he wanted to kill me."

"I think he just likes to know that I get home safely. Maybe he thinks you're a crappy driver."

"Seriously, though."

"I am serious. You know my mom died in an accident. I think every time he sees your truck leave the driveway he starts freaking out, like I'm never gonna come back." She put her phone down on the counter and came over to sit on the floor, rested her arms on his shoulder. "Look, I know it's dumb. He's always trying to talk my brothers into going out and finding girlfriends, but the moment I start dating a boy he spends all his time worrying that I'm gonna move out and never talk to him again. But at least he doesn't try to keep me away from you. And he never says anything bad about you, or anything. He'll warm up to you, just like he warmed up to me being away at college."

Dipper considered it for a moment. He hadn't lost anybody close to him since his grandma at the age of six, when he was far too young to feel the full impact of grief. He couldn't know what it felt like to lose a wife, and from the photos Dipper had seen, Wendy's mom looked a lot like her; maybe Dan really did stand by the window whenever Dipper picked Wendy up and maybe he did fear that she would never return, and another fragment of his life would be stolen away. "Okay," Dipper said, and Wendy kissed him, and he went back to pricing the bobbleheads, not quite satisfied, but he knew from his limited experience with relationships that they required compromise, and if dating the girl of his dreams meant dealing with a creepy, intimidating father, then so be it.

But Dan never did stop waiting at the end of his driveway. Dipper stopped bothering to switch off his high beams, hoping the threat of blindness would deter him, but the man was a monolith, arms folded, week after week after week, a brown bottle tucked in the nook of his elbow every once in a while, the headlights casting eerie shadows on his face. The blatant domineering didn't irritate Dipper as much as the fact that Wendy usually dressed up for their dates, in an off-shoulder top or a green dress that she liked, and although Wendy's natural, everyday looks were a part of her charm, the lipstick, mascara, and perfume were an alluring combination, and Dipper didn't always want to end the night with a chaste kiss when his body longed for more. But they couldn't do more – Dan was watching them like a child peering into a fish tank. And if Wendy ever invited Dipper inside he wouldn't step out of his truck; all it would take was one swing of Dan's fist and Dipper would sail over the trees and land on somebody's roof in the center of town.

"I can't pick you up from your house anymore," he told her one afternoon in spring. They were in his bed, staring at the ceiling, Stan's old stereo playing a Metallica CD Wendy had fished out of the bargain bin at a record shop in White City. 

Wendy snickered, which annoyed him. He had spent several hours considering how to address the problem, and he was very serious. "Why's that?" she said.

"It's too weird. Your dad is clearly uncomfortable whenever I'm within a mile of the place."

She sighed and rolled over, faced the far wall. "This again?"

"Yes, this again. It's fucking weird. It creeps me out."

"So... you're gonna make me walk home?"

"No, we just won't drive. We can do stuff in town."

"Alright. I guess if we get tired of bowling we can always go over to the social club and play bingo."

"Wendy, I'm being dead serious." He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down, but she was scrolling through a news feed on her phone. It had been raining all afternoon but now the sun had come out, bathing the attic in a golden glow, and the tips of Wendy's hair rested in the light from the window, bright orange. "Will you look at me?" 

She rolled over and looked up in his eyes, her expression softening.

"It's been four months," he said. "Was he like this with your other boyfriends?"

"I don't know. He never liked Robbie from the start, because he was... well, he was Robbie. And if I met guys in college Dad just asked me a bunch of questions, but he never met them. I told you about Dylan and Malachi. I wasn't with either of them for very long. I've never been with anyone for four months, except for Robbie. So I don't really have much to compare this to." She took Dipper's free hand and weaved their fingers together. "I think he has been getting worse, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Like... it's as if the grief affects him now more than ever. Last week I came home from work and he was passed out on the couch, and on the coffee table he had a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and he had all these photo albums open, photos of him and my mom, before any of us were born. I woke him up and I wanted to look at the photos, too. I had no idea he even had them. But he swept them all up and put them away in his bedroom, like I wasn't supposed to see them. God knows how often he gets those out when no-one else is home."

"Do you think he needs therapy or something?"

"Man, can you imagine my dad seeing a therapist? I mean, I'll suggest it to him, but he's only gonna get angry." She groaned and rubbed her eyes. "I hate thinking about this. Can you read me one of your stories?"

Dipper sighed and lay back down. "Yeah. Pass me the notebook. It's in the top drawer." He gazed up at the dusty rafters. It seemed like every time he mentioned Wendy's dad, the puzzle grew larger, more intricate. All he wanted was to be able to walk into her home without feeling as unwelcome as a chicken in a lion's den. Now, it was looking like he would have to fight through a jungle of deep-rooted psychological issues to get there. 

"What are these?" Wendy said, and held up his yellow bottle of lithium tablets. 

Dipper reached out and grabbed them, which, he soon realized, was pointless. They hadn't vanished and Wendy didn't suffer from short-term memory loss. "Multivitamins," he said.

Wendy sat up and glanced at his hands, clamped around the bottle. She frowned. "Dipper, what are they?"

It wasn't a secret he had planned on keeping forever. He wanted to tell her, he had come close to telling her, more than once – back in November, when they were only friends, up on the roof, but the words had died in his throat. He had always treasured the quiet moments they shared, staring into the sky, their bodies barely touching. He drew a great deal of comfort from those moments, and knew that Wendy did too, and he wouldn't want to taint any second of one by talking about the violent tendencies he was so ashamed of. Now that they were together, he knew that Wendy loved him – it was written on her face when she woke and she looked up at him and broke into a lazy smile, but a couple months longer was all Dipper had wanted. A couple months longer and he could have been sure that his disorder wouldn't drive the girl away.

He sighed and leaned back on the pillows, released his grip on the bottle. It rolled off his knee and landed on the sheets, but Wendy didn't reach for it, she simply waited for him to speak. "Lithium," he said. "It's a mood stabilizer. I'm bipolar."

His eyes were cast down at the bottle, as if the pills were at fault for revealing themselves. Wendy wasn't the type to rifle through other people's things, so he had never worried about keeping the bottle hidden, and now if she dumped him he would only have his own carelessness to blame – he had taken the medication that morning, threw the bottle in the drawer, closed the drawer with his knee, and then invited her to rummage around in it not four hours later. He might as well have peeled the label off the bottle and framed it.

Wendy shook her head, though out of confusion rather than abhorrence. "Since when?"

"I was diagnosed two years ago."

"That doesn't make any sense. You're not... I mean, you're you. You're sweet, and kind. And like, reliably sweet. You never get angry at anyone."

Dipper smiled, though his face felt heavier, and he was suddenly tired despite the daylight. The explanations ahead of him sprung up one by one in his mind, mountains he now had to climb. "When you started college and we fell out of touch... there are things that happened in the last three years that I haven't told you about."

She sat unmoving, hands between her legs, while Dipper described the events leading up to his diagnosis, the boy he had fought in the cafeteria during sophomore year, and then the month before finals, when Dipper had barely emerged from his room, and Mabel had brought him his dinner so he could eat it in bed, and every time she tried to talk to him he lay there, silent, facing the wall, until she left, quietly crying, and Dipper hated himself more than he had the day before. He told Wendy the real reason he had come to Gravity Falls, to escape a town that associated his name with a bad temper and a trigger-happy fist, and he told her about his fight with Doug Tanner and why he hadn't had a drop of alcohol since. 

Wendy made a whimpering sound and threw her arms around him, nuzzled his neck. "My poor baby," she said, and it was the opposite reaction to what Dipper was expecting, so it took him a moment to sink into the embrace. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I didn't want to scare you away."

"Dipper, you could never scare me away. It's not like you were violent on purpose. You can't control it."

It was supposed to make him feel better, but it didn't. "I can control it, though, when I'm on the medication. If I'm taking them everyday, I can control everything, and I haven't missed a day since last summer, and I still... attacked this guy, out of nowhere. I was fine one minute, and the next, I just snapped. That's dangerous."

"You were drinking. Everyone does stupid things when they're drinking."

He rolled his eyes. "It isn't the same, Wendy."

"Hey." She stroked his cheek, up to the stubble beside his ear, and looked in his eyes. "I know you, dude. You're an over-thinker. I know that taking these pills makes you feel like you're evil, and you're not. That party was, what, almost a year ago? Eight months? And nothing has happened since then?"

He felt his muscles relax, still in her grip. "No," he said, and smiled. "I think you have something to do with that."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I moved up here to take my mind away from school. And Piedmont in general. I was going to do that by working in the Shack and writing about the countryside, but you're the one who's been my distraction. You and your beautiful face."

She snorted. "Okay, dork. No need to get all mushy." A grin crept up on her face and she kissed him. "I love you."

"I love you too." He rested his forehead against hers, and soon she was kissing him again, the kind of deep, forceful kiss that drove Dipper crazy, made him turbulent with energy, so that his hands roamed her body through her clothes, unsatisfied with every place they landed. His hands wanted more; they yearned for bare skin and her breasts, but Dipper would not grant himself the pleasure. Since New Years' Eve, there had only been one occasion that he had overstepped Wendy's hazy boundary between acceptable and unacceptable contact – he had lifted her shirt and kissed the skin under her belly button, and she had scooted up against the pillows, and he had apologized profusely, and she started kissing him and they never brought it up again, but Dipper remembered. Now, he let her set the pace all the time, and that pace was always slow but he didn't mind, even when his body ached for more. If they grew old together and their relationship became as platonic as sitting out on a front porch on rocking chairs, occasionally holding hands, and they hadn't had sex once, Dipper liked to think that he still wouldn't mind, because sex wasn't important to him, and Wendy was everything.

They lay down again and must have made out for the better part of an hour, and when Dipper opened his eyes the attic was gloomy again, the sun reclaimed by the clouds. It was getting to the time of day that Wendy took a nap, so she buried her head in Dipper's chest and he held her close to him, and he wanted to suggest that they get up and go out somewhere, lest this become another bed-bound day, but her sleepiness was contagious and he closed his eyes, fell asleep to the scent of apple shampoo.

***

Stan occasionally hosted poker games round his dining table, and although the noise of Stan's friends shouting and cackling had to pass two floors to reach Dipper, it was still obnoxious enough that he tended to leave the Shack for the evening, and either go see Wendy or sit on the beach by the lake, writing horror stories on his tablet, his eyes flitting up to the dark woodland surrounding the water.

One night in June, it was hot enough for the attic to be unbearable, and the couch to be sticky, and Stan moved the dining table out to the grass just between the front porch and the parking lot. Dipper came out on the porch in just his shorts and watched his uncle lighting candles in the center of the table. Stan looked up at him and said, "hey! Put a shirt on. My buddies are getting here any minute."

"Sorry, this is still poker, right? Or have you decided to wine and dine your male friends?"

"The lantern's busted and we need to be able to see the cards, wise-ass. This is my only choice." He put his hands on his hips and glanced at the table. "But you're right. I can see how this could be perceived as romantic."

"As long as you don't try to kiss anyone, I think you'll be fine."

"Hey, how about you join us tonight, huh? It's too hot in there to fester in your room all night." 

It was an offer Stan made every time, and every time Dipper refused. He knew how to play – he had played a few games with his school friends, though he'd never won any money from it – but he didn't know how long he could endure the banter of a group of rowdy fifty- and sixty-year-olds. "I don't know, Stan."

"C'mon. What are you worried about? You're smart, and you don't drink. Chances are you could walk away with the whole pot, playing with a bunch of drunk old-timers like us."

Dipper sighed just as a pleasant breeze did. He was too sweaty to see his girlfriend, and it was too hot to think about writing, so he shrugged and said, "alright."

Stan slapped Dipper's bare back on his way into the house. "Attaboy. Now go put a fucking shirt on. I want the guys focusing on the cards, not your nipples."

The buy-in was thirty dollars and the players were Stan, Sheriff Blubbs, Dan Corduroy, and one of his logging crew, Ross Cartwright. The three guests all pulled up in Blubbs' car, came over to the table, and immediately started pouring glasses of Dan's whiskey, and Stan started doling out chips and shuffling the cards. They didn't even greet each other – they were in the middle of a conversation about a woman who had moved into town and Stan naturally joined in. None of them acknowledged that Dipper was there, but he took out his wallet and laid a twenty in the center of the table, and none of them raised any concerns about him playing, either. 

His first few hands were weak, yielding nothing but a pair of sevens, but by the time he had lost half his chips, he was dealt a king and a jack, and another king came up in the flop. Stan and Ross folded, followed by Blubbs when a jack came up as the turn, and straight after, Dan threw ten dollars into the pot. He glared at Dipper over the top of the flickering candle flames, the orange light painting him more menacing than usual, but Dipper found that he was unperturbed. He matched the bet, depositing his chips in a neat stack, and Dan laughed and said, "you do not want to go down this road, kid."

Blubbs said, "let him go down whatever road he wants to go down," and nodded at Dipper. Blubbs turned over the final card, six of diamonds, and Dan raised again – five dollars. Dipper ran his eyes back and forth along the cards, tried not to chew the inside of his cheek. There were three diamonds face-up, so Dan might have had a flush, but Dipper didn't trust that Dan had waited until his friends were out to invest any real money in this hand, so Dipper matched the bet again. 

Dan revealed his cards first – pair of aces, and Dipper exhaled quietly and sat back in his chair when he flipped his own cards. "Two pairs," he said, and the other gentlemen at the table laughed. Blubbs clapped him on the shoulder.

Ross said, "the hell were you thinking, going all-in on a pair of aces?" 

Only then did Dipper realize he was raking Dan's last fifteen dollars towards him. "He didn't think I'd be able to call a bluff," Dipper said. 

Dan looked up again, looked at Dipper like he might lunge across the table and strangle him, but he just chuckled again and said, "yeah, that's exactly it." He held out one gigantic hand and Dipper tried to match his firm shake. "Well played," he said.

Dipper couldn't stop grinning, satisfied at having shown Dan Corduroy up and satisfied at having won a little of the man's respect, though he soon remembered that he had surpassed the point of wanting it. He had long ago grown tired of Dan becoming colder as the seasons became warmer, and now all he wanted was for Dan to know that the standoff could last as long as he liked – it wasn't going to stop Dipper from dating his daughter. 

Dan bought back in and the game went on for another couple of hours; Stan called it at midnight, and Blubbs had won about sixty dollars. Dipper stepped away with ten, and Dan with five.

Dan guzzled the rest of his whiskey and glowered at Blubbs. "Congratulations. Are you gonna buy something to pound your husband in the ass with?"

Blubbs laughed, the same carefree way he had been laughing all night, flicking through the cash in his hand even though he knew the amount already. "Why would I need to do that when I just pounded your ass at poker?"

Dan winced. "Don't say shit like that."

"Like what?"

"That faggot shit."

Stan stood and stretched his back. "Not this again."

"Makes me sick imagining what them two get up to," Dan said.

Blubbs finished his water and stood up, stuffed his wallet into his pocket. "Stop imagining it, then." He shook Stan's hand and then Dipper's. Ross gave them both a wave but Dan's exit was unceremonious; he coughed and spat in the dirt halfway to Blubbs' car.

The chatter was replaced with crickets, and the air was a lot cooler now that the sun had been absent for a few hours. Dipper had a sour taste in his mouth. "Why do you guys let him talk like that?" he said.

Stan extinguished the last candle on the table and picked up three glasses with one hand. "Who?"

"Dan. Why do you let him talk shit about Blubbs and his husband?"

"They're only messing around."

"Didn't sound like he was messing around."

"Well, they might have been messing around and they might not have been. Doesn't make any difference – they've been friends for twenty years, at least. You wait twenty years and see how you talk with your friends."

Stan pressed a hand to his back again and hobbled to the porch steps. Dipper was left unsatisfied with the answer. He put his hands in the pockets of his shorts and watched Blubbs' car pull out of the lot, onto the road, the red tail lights flashing between trees and eventually disappearing. As normal when something was bothering him, he reached for his phone to call Wendy, but stopped himself. Wendy had never appreciated Dipper's criticisms of her father. Dipper's dislike of the man and her familial instinct to defend him had been the only real strain on their relationship, and he knew that if he called Wendy now, they would fight, and she would hang up on him, and he wouldn't be able to shake the guilt from upsetting her until morning, when she woke up and he could call her again. He kicked the dirt at his feet and went inside.


	4. Chapter 4

One morning, Dipper drove west out of town to pick up his prescription of lithium. The local pharmacy had neglected to fulfill it and they referred him to another one, in a strip mall by the side of the interstate about twenty miles away. He never had any reason to visit the west side of Gravity Falls, so on his way back into town he drove slowly and looked out for anything that might have changed since his summers as a teenager. Bud Gleeful's used car dealership came up on his left, and Dipper pulled over at the side of the road and stopped, because in the far corner of the lot sat Wendy's red van, the familiar flannel pattern sticking out like a sore thumb.

Dipper squinted, through the haze brought on by the heat, and although it was boxed in by other vehicles, that was the van, alright. Dipper could hardly believe it. Wendy had spoken of the van like it was a lost relic, and yet here it stood, taller than anything else in the lot, not a mile away from her house. At sixteen, she had dubbed it the 'Escape Van,' and driven it deep into the woods or up into the mountains whenever she wanted to forget about life for a while. Dipper steered his truck onto the grass at the side of the road and got out. 

As he crossed the lot, a bell rang to his right; Bud pushed open the door of the showroom. "Howdy," he called out, and halfway to Dipper, recognition lit up his face. "Dipper Pines. Well, I must have seen you in town just last week but I thought my eyes were deceiving me. How have you been, son?"

Bud was in a straw hat, leather boots, and he had one too many buttons open on his shirt for Dipper's comfort, but the guy was friendly, and Dipper shook his hand. "Fine, thanks. How are you?"

"Good, I'm good. How's that uncle of yours doing?"

"He's doing okay. Slower than ever, but okay. How's, um– how's Gideon?"

Bud rolled his eyes and folded his arms. "He's a slacker, is what he is. Spends all day on the couch playing his _game-station_ or whatever it is he does. Doesn't know what to do with his life. Says he needs time to _reflect_ after high school, but he graduated a year ago. I say to him, come out on the showroom floor every once in a while, get a taste for sales. Does he listen? No, sir."

Dipper refrained from saying anything, Gideon's situation being far too close to his own.

"Anyway, what can I do you for? See anything you like? We've got a sale on." He pointed to the banner over the entrance, but Dipper couldn't remember a time he had passed by the dealership and Bud _hadn't_ had a sale on.

Dipper pointed to the corner of the lot. "That van used to belong to my girlfriend. She had to sell it a couple years back."

"Oh, yes. Wendy Corduroy. Well, I can tell you that it hasn't moved in those two years, 'cept for when I drove it over to the corner there. I knew when she came in here with it I was taking a risk, I knew I wouldn't be able to sell it. But her dad's a friend of the family and she needed the money so I thought, ah, what the hell."

"So it's still for sale?"

"Oh, yes, yes." He led Dipper over to the Volkswagen, squeezing between the bonnet of a sedan and the rear of a four-by-four. There were cracks in the asphalt only on this corner of the lot, weeds pushing through, all around the tires of the van. "There are some scratches in the paintwork, here and here, but otherwise she's in fine condition."

Dipper walked around to the back, only pretending to inspect the vehicle – in truth he had no idea what to look out for. He lifted a hand to one of the rear windows and peered inside, expecting to find some kind of remnant of Wendy's teenage years, but the interior was bare. There was no trace of her ever having owned it. "How much?" Dipper asked.

Bud stepped back and scratched his chin. "It's been so long since I even considered a price for this one. Usually I'd sell a Volkswagen like this for four to five thousand, but seeing as you'd be doing a favor getting it off my property, I could do thirty-five hundred. Now that's gonna go up if I need to replace the engine, but that shouldn't be the case. I go around and run the cars every now and then, make sure they get a little bit of attention. Keeps the engines intact."

Dipper swallowed, nodded, tried not to appear too stunned by the price. He knew then and there that he didn't have three thousand dollars in his bank account, but still he stood by the van, nodding his head, appearing deep in thought, as if by waiting long enough he could summon the money out of thin air. 

"I can show you some other options if you'd like?" Bud said. "What kind of budget are we looking at?"

"No, it's okay," Dipper said. "I was only interested in the van for Wendy. Maybe... keep it here for another year or two and I'll come back." He smiled and slipped back through the gap in the surrounding vehicles.

"Now hold on," Bud said, and when Dipper turned around, Bud was staring out at Dipper's pick-up beyond the fence. "Is that your wheels out there in the street?"

***

Dipper parked the van on the main road around the corner from the Corduroy cabin. He hopped out and started up the driveway, swung the keys around on his finger, then stowed them away in the back pocket of his jeans. He heard the echo of logs being chopped and went around the side of the cabin; Wendy was in the back yard, already at work cutting the firewood they would sell come winter. 

She lifted the bill of her baseball cap as she looked up, and broke into a grin. "Hey, you." She threw the axe down in the dry dirt and came over to give Dipper a kiss. "What are you doing here?"

He stole her cap and put it on his own head. Strands of her hair stood up but she did nothing to fix it, just put her hands on her hips and looked up at him expectantly. He dipped his head and kissed her again. "Let's go for a walk," he said, and took her hand.

"A walk? Where?"

"Not far. I've got something to show you."

"I'm supposed to be working," she said, though Dipper knew it was a shallow protest. Wendy had never been a fan of working.

"Well, now you're on break."

"You're lucky my dad isn't home."

'Lucky' wasn't quite the word for it – Dipper knew Dan's working hours, and he wouldn't have come to the house if Dan was off the clock. Sure, Dipper would have been fine to walk into their back yard – Dan would have watched him from the porch, but he wouldn't have stopped him – but he knew that Dan would have followed them down the driveway, too, and Dipper didn't want any moment he shared with Wendy to be overshadowed, quite literally, by her ape of a father.

As they neared the quiet road, Dipper told Wendy to close her eyes and promise she would keep them closed. They walked hand in hand along the uneven grass by the side of the road, and when they came to the van, Dipper stopped and told her she could look.

First, she frowned, then her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open and she let go of his hand, took two steps forward but froze in place. She turned, her arms out to the side like she didn't know what to do with them. "What is this? Is this the same one?"

Dipper couldn't stop grinning. "Yeah. Who in their right mind would paint a van like that?"

She turned back to the van. "How the hell– what did you do? How did you get it here?"

He stepped forward and put a hand on the small of her back. "I bought it."

"Are you _nuts?_ How did you afford it?"

"Well, I didn't really _buy_ it. I traded my pickup for it."

Out of all the reactions Dipper had expected, anger was probably last on the list. Wendy shoved his chest so hard he thought he might fall over. "No," she said. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need to go back to wherever this came from and undo it."

"What? Wendy, it's fine. I can get another truck. If I save up a little longer I'll–"

"No, shut up. You're gonna go back and get _your_ truck. You _love_ your truck! It's all you ever talk about, is your fucking truck."

"I love you a lot more than my truck."

For a second, Wendy's eyes were feral, and when she jumped at Dipper, he thought, _this is it, she's going to scratch me to death,_ but her arms snaked around his neck and her knees came all the way up to his back and she kissed him as if the world were about to end. Dipper wasn't a strong man, and he was only just able to carry her without the two of them toppling over onto the asphalt, but he managed to hang on until their lips parted and they caught their breath. 

"I love you," Wendy breathed. "I love you so much."

"Then get off me," Dipper said, "or you're going to break my arms."

Wendy jumped back into the road and swept her hair out of her eyes. "Does it– like, does it work? Can I drive it?"

"Of course it works." He took the keys from his pocket and tossed them to her.

She clutched the keys in her fist and walked around to the driver side door, but before she got there her eyes lit up again. "My shirt," she said. "I need to go get my shirt."

"Are you kidding? The van's right there, after all this time. Just get in, already."

"I know. I know it's ridiculous, but I need my shirt." She touched his arm and then ran off, didn't even use the driveway, just sprinted into the woods, dodging trees, aiming for the cabin. Dipper sat on the hood of the van and tapped his foot on the road until she came back in her red flannel, out of breath. She tugged at the hem of the shirt and grinned at him, her teeth almost glinting in the sun. "Now we're talking," she said, and finally got in the van.

Dipper climbed into the passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt, watched Wendy begin the ceremony of starting the engine. The look on her face as she turned the key, like a kid on Christmas – that alone was worth trading the pickup for. The engine rumbled and then growled to life, and Wendy threw her head back against the headrest and laughed. "So awesome," she said, gripping the steering wheel. Dipper had to remind her to put her seatbelt on before she pulled out into the road. 

The road ran dead straight out of town, southward, rolling over hills that restricted a driver's vision while they were between them. Wendy brought the van up to sixty-five as fast as she could and kept it there. "I can't believe it," she said, and slapped her palms on the wheel. "I can't _believe_ it! It feels so good. I'm gonna pull over, you can have a turn."

Dipper laughed. "No, I drove it over here already. It's all yours."

"Dipper, I can't– what were you thinking? I mean, what are you gonna drive now? We can share the van, I guess, but–"

"We don't need to share the van. Bud let me have an old Fiesta as part of the deal. It's not... great, and it's very green, but it's a car."

"I can't imagine you driving anything that isn't your truck."

"Stop worrying about the truck. I'm over it already. All I care about is knowing that you're happy."

"Happy? Dipper, I'm not just– you know what?" She slowed the car, steered into the grass, and killed the engine. "Unbuckle your seatbelt."

"What? Wendy, I don't want to drive, really."

She unbuckled it for him, then leaped over the console and straddled him against the seat. "I know," she murmured, her forehead pressed against his.

"Oh," he said, and they kissed and touched by the side of the road, the occasional car whizzing past and catching a glimpse of them pressed together in the front seats.

***

Two nights later, Wendy knocked on the door of the Shack and Dipper let her in, and they climbed up to the attic. She was wearing a red sundress and a silver necklace, her freckled shoulders on display.

"I didn't realize we were dressing up tonight," he said. He opened his wardrobe and flicked through the few shirts that were hung up and not in the bundle of clothes at the bottom, picked out a blue button-down and threw his t-shirt on the bed.

"You don't have to dress up if you don't want," Wendy said, and Dipper noticed she was hurrying around the room, going through all of the drawers she could find. She stepped up to the wardrobe and peered inside, over his shoulder.

"What are you looking for?"

She didn't respond, just walked over to the nightstand beside Mabel's old bed and started searching through that, too. Dipper shook his head and sighed; he was sure she had picked up this habit from him – often when Dipper had his mind set on an idea, every other facet of life became background noise, to a point that he failed to notice words that were spoken right in front of him. It was worse when he suddenly conjured up the idea of a story to write in the middle of the day – he would retreat to his room and rejoin reality some time in the evening, check his phone and find unanswered messages from six hours before.

"Aha," Wendy said. She held up a pink sleep mask. "Perfect."

"Perfect for what?"

"We're not actually going bowling tonight. I have a surprise for you."

"Oh, god."

"It's a good surprise. Don't freak out. When we get in the van I want you to put this on so you don't know where we're going."

"Jesus. That's a little bit sinister."

"Just shut up and get dressed."

Dipper tried not to complain. He wasn't a fan of surprises – being on the receiving end of them, anyway – but Wendy was clearly excited and he didn't want to ruin it for her. As they pulled out of the Shack's parking lot, he got the sudden suspicion that she was tricking him into returning to the dealership, to swap the van for the pickup, but he could tell by the turns they made that that was not the case. In fact, the blindness served to heighten his sense of direction, and after a series of left and right turns he knew they were on the road that climbed the mountain north of town. There was a flat clearing near the summit – Lookout Point. They had been up there a couple of times in the winter and sat in the bed of his truck, under a blanket.

Sure enough, the ground beneath the tires became even, and the van came to a stop. Wendy shut off the engine and told him to stay put with the blindfold on. He heard her open the rear doors of the van and rifle through whatever had been sliding about and jingling all the way here. She shut the doors and there was a moment of total silence, before the passenger side door opened and Wendy told him to take off the blindfold.

He couldn't see much over the dashboard of the van – only the cliffs on the other side of the valley and the forest of pines on top – but he stepped out onto the dirt, over to the weathered rope lining the clearing, and down in the valley Gravity Falls was a cluster of yellow lights, the streetlights on the road leading south out of town giving way to the dark after a few hundred yards. "Okay," Dipper said, the notion to act surprised having slipped his mind.

"The surprise is round here, Dipper." She stood by the tail of the van and nodded towards the woods. Dipper followed her around the back of the van, and between it and the trees sat one circular table, two chairs, complete with a white tablecloth, a candle, two wine glasses, even folded napkins.

Dipper laughed. "Wow. I wasn't expecting that." He walked over and trailed his fingers along the smooth tablecloth. "Did you just set this up?"

"No, I did it earlier. I lit the candle just now." She stood by the table while he inspected it, her hands clasped together, almost shy. "Do you like it?"

"I love it," he said, and he kissed her. "But, um... I'm curious to know what we're going to eat." To be blunt, Wendy couldn't really cook. Neither of them could, which was why when they were together, their diet mainly consisted of Chinese takeout and frozen pizzas. 

"I'm glad you asked." She returned to the back of the van and brought out a portable grill, opened it up to show him, then threw it down in the dirt like it was nothing, the metal rack inside rattling loudly. She also took out a tripod, to stand the grill on, a bag of charcoal, a pack of two sirloin steaks from the supermarket, and a bag of salted chips, which she tossed to Dipper. "Steak and chips," she said. "Sit your ass down. Don't even _think_ about trying to help."

"Alright, alright." He sat in the chair facing the van, the lights of Gravity Falls visible off to the side. Wendy set up the grill and lit it, took an electric lantern and placed it on top of the van so she could see what she was doing. 

She brought over a can of something to the table and took his wine glass. "Grape soda?" Without waiting for a response, she filled both glasses and held hers out. "To the hottest couple in town," she said.

He smirked as their glasses clinked together. "To the hottest girl in the country."

"I don't know about that."

The steaks sizzled as Wendy worked the grill, her back to Dipper. The moon was bright enough that he could see the pillar of smoke rise into the indigo sky, pointing slightly to the left in the light breeze. The clouds were few and wispy, the full array of constellations he had watched all his life perfectly visible. When Dipper wasn't looking up, he was watching Wendy, her hips dancing from side to side to a nonexistent tune and her long hair swaying along with them. He hadn't noticed until now that the dress clung tightly to her body, and suddenly there was something about her cooking steaks in a sundress that had him more lovestruck than ever. He got up from the table and crept behind her, brought his hands around to her stomach and kissed her neck, inhaling smoke and the savory aroma of the meat.

"Um, excuse me," she said, paying him no interest. "You're supposed to be sitting down."

"How can I sit over there when you're over here being all beautiful?"

"If you were patient, you would have found out that I've allocated time this evening for us to get handsy, and it's not while I'm making our dinner."

Dipper laughed into her neck. "So all the times you've ridiculed me for making schedules and lists and now you're like, the Stalin of schedules."

"Well, Dipper, clearly you've had a bad influence on me."

They ate without talking much, which was nothing out of the ordinary. Dipper was aware that neither of them led hugely exciting lives. They were both in the in-between stage, no longer children but not quite adults, either, both living with family, working monotonous jobs that weren't on the ladders they wanted to climb, even though they weren't yet aware of the ladders they each wanted to climb. If a talking point cropped up in their lives it was likely to come from the people around them – Mabel got a new boyfriend, Kevin was playing soccer again, et cetera. The long conversations about their dreams, aspirations, the nights spent trying to uncover everything there was to know about one another, those had fizzled out quite early on in their relationship, and yet the romance had not. If anything, Dipper was more in love with Wendy than when they first got together that night on the rooftop. Even tonight, they kept catching each other's eyes across the table and smiling in unison, each time further cementing the belief in Dipper's mind that they were meant to be together. 

After dinner, Wendy again dipped into the seemingly endless bounty stashed away in the back of her van and pulled out a boom box, of all things. She brought it over and slammed it down on the table, planted a hand on her hip. "I brought some music."

"I know where this is going, and–"

"Dipper, I am a girl who enjoys dancing. That will forever be the case. As your girlfriend, I would really enjoy it if we were to dance together. I have brought you up here, where there is _literally_ no chance of _anybody_ being within distance of seeing you."

"Ah, so there was an ulterior motive to all of this."

Her face fell, almost like she was about to cry, and Dipper jumped to his feet.

"Whoa, hey, I was kidding." He rubbed her arms.

"It's not an ulterior motive. I brought you up here so we could have a nice evening. For you. I can put the boom box away if you want me to."

"Wendy, no." He cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her forehead. "I'm sorry. Of course I'll dance with you."

"Really?"

"Yeah. What kind of music did you bring?"

She cleared her throat. "I made a 90s mix on my computer. You know, because of the–" she held up the boom box.

Wendy's taste in music didn't really fall in the realms of radio-friendly, so the CD she had made wasn't something the high school class of '99 would have heard at their prom. There was some metal and punk music that they would have been better off thrashing their heads to instead of slow dancing, but by the time Dipper had gotten the hang of not stepping on Wendy's feet, and not tripping over his own, a slower Smashing Pumpkins tune came on that he had a feeling she had chosen for him.

Dipper moved the hand on her waist to draw her a little closer, and she smiled and pressed her forehead against his. They turned in circles in the center of the clearing, the stereo quiet over on the table, not a soul around to see, or hear. "If you wanted me to dance with you, you could have just asked," Dipper said.

Her jaw dropped. "I have asked! Many, many times."

"That was before I got you your van back. You should have known by now that there's nothing I won't do for you."

Wendy grinned and gazed up at him, but slowly the look faded, her eyes turned solemn.

"What's wrong?"

Tears sprung to her eyes and she shook her head.

"Wendy, what is it?"

"Don't leave," she said. "Please don't leave. I know that you were only supposed to move here temporarily, and I know that you're not going to college yet, not this year, anyway, but I know that you have a life back in California that you're going to need to go back to. And if that's the case I want to work something out, maybe I can go with you, I don't know, but just... please don't leave me."

Dipper shook his head, the words he needed to say not jumping off his tongue. She had caught him completely off guard. He almost felt guilty. Had he not told her enough that he loved her? Had he not assured her that it would be physically impossible to leave her side? "I won't leave you," he said. "I won't ever leave you."

It was strange, Dipper noticed, that they were still dancing, their feet moving to the rhythm of the music on autopilot, despite the shifting tone in their conversation.

Wendy let out a wet laugh, and a tear fell from her cheek and landed somewhere on Dipper's shirt. "You say that now, but–"

"No, there aren't any buts," he told her. "Yeah, I have a life back in California, and yeah, there are a handful of people I'd like to go back to, but I wouldn't even _dream_ of it if you weren't coming with me."

She cupped his cheeks and kissed him, and then her arms almost strangled his neck as she inched closer, pressed their chests together, kissed him again. For a while they stayed clasped together in the center of the clearing, and they grabbed at one another's clothes almost in frustration, as if they only served as obstacles to the skin that they wanted to touch. Dipper sensed a difference in Wendy, maybe a readiness to explore their intimacy a little further, but he let her set the pace.

A few minutes must have passed before Wendy backed into the side of the van. They pried their lips apart and opened their eyes, and Dipper looked around and felt a pang of terror – they had been so lost in the moment that they could just as easily have tripped on the rope around the clearing and toppled over the cliff.

Wendy didn't appear to notice. "I think I'm ready," she breathed.

Dipper swallowed. "Are you sure?"

She nodded, but only after a second's hesitation, and that wasn't enough. 

"Wendy, you don't have to do anything just for me. I'll wait as long as it takes."

Her face relaxed into a smile, and she took his hands. "I'm ready."

She led him around to the back of the van and opened the doors. There were a couple of cardboard boxes and a cooler, but behind that was a single mattress, complete with the blue pillows from Wendy's bed and a thick red blanket. Wendy jumped up and perched on the back of the van, then hopped over the boxes and the cooler, the mattress squeaking below her. She turned and crawled on her back, up to the pillows, and lay there leaning on her elbows, her legs spread apart in a way that Dipper didn't think was intentionally alluring, but the sight excited him so much that he tripped on one of the boxes as he attempted to mimic Wendy's nimble entrance. He flumped onto the mattress and his hand slammed into her midriff. She groaned and clutched her stomach and Dipper said, "shit, are you okay?" but Wendy laughed, in between deep breaths.

"Come here, you goon," she said, and pulled him down on top of her. They rolled around on the bed, kissing each other's necks and cheeks, the blanket sticking to their legs. The doors were open but the breeze outside wouldn't come in, and soon the summer heat – combined with the confines of the van and their own frenzied movement – made them both sweat. Dipper sat up and gazed down at Wendy in the dark, wiped his forehead, breathing heavily. She sat up on her knees and started to unbutton his shirt. Outside the music was faint but still playing, only audible when they weren't breathing in each other's faces or ruffling their clothes. It dawned on Dipper, as his eyes scoured Wendy's dress, that he didn't know how to take it off, and he laughed under his breath.

Wendy looked up. "What?" she said.

"This is gonna sound dumb, but I don't know how to take your dress off."

She smirked, unfastened the last button on his shirt, and pulled it off his arms, tossed it into the gap between the mattress and the side of the van. "Try it," she said.

"Again, this is gonna sound stupid, but I don't even know where to start." He reached around to the small of her back and trailed his hand upwards over the smooth fabric, until he came to her bare skin. "I can't feel a zip or anything."

She stretched her arms above her head, grinning. "Just lift it off. Like a t-shirt."

He started with the arms, then went to her waist, gently tugging upwards on the material. The wavy hem rose and revealed the milky skin of her thighs, followed by white underwear, and Dipper looked away, not wanting to encroach on her privacy, before realizing that that was a ridiculous thought. The dress was loose enough now that he could pull it over her head, and as he did so, he took a breath, tried to still his heart. A montage of all the unsolicited advice his friends had thrown around in high school played through his head – _don't be too rough; you want to last as long as possible; use your fingers, girls love the fingers_. When the dress was off, Dipper held it in his hands and ignored the strange urge to sniff it, and Wendy patted down her frizzy hair. He looked her up and down, stepping out of the moment for a second to wonder if life would ever be more exhilarating than it was right now, but then Wendy leaped at him and they were kissing again.

They sank back into the mattress. Wendy unbuckled Dipper's belt and he struggled to pull off his jeans while Wendy kissed his neck, impatient. It was all so perfect, the feel of her skin, the fire in her eyes, the soft humming noise she made when they kissed, but perfect things don't last, and when Dipper touched her through her underwear, she flinched.

He pulled his hand away like he had burned himself. "Sorry," he said. "I'm really sorry."

"No," she said. "I want you to." She took his hand and dragged it back toward her crotch, pressed it up against her underwear, a tiny wet patch in the center, warm to the touch. Something between a moan and a sigh escaped her, and her muscles relaxed underneath him. "You can put your hand in," she breathed. "Please."

Her eyes fluttered shut, then, and Dipper hovered above her, waited patiently for a sign that she didn't want him inside of her, but no sign came. He put a palm against her stomach and tucked it into the hem of her underwear, explored the fleshy skin underneath, massaged it gently with his fingers, and Wendy's breath picked up, her eyes still shut. He slipped one finger between the folds, surprised at the warmth and the wetness, and Wendy moaned louder so he kept going, gradually picking up the speed of the motion and pushing his finger further inside.

And then, as if a switch had been flipped, his finger was clamped, and he looked up just in time to see Wendy's fist sail into his cheek. The flash of pain didn't surprise him, but the noise did – a loud, dull thud, followed by a piercing ring in his ear. His vision turned gray and fuzzy for a second, like an old television set, and he squinted, trying to make out Wendy's body, only focusing on deflecting another attack instead of questioning the motive behind the first one.

But she was pressed up against the back of the seats, sitting on a pillow, her hands over her mouth, tears brimming in her eyes. "I'm sorry," she whimpered.

"It's okay," Dipper said, his own voice nearly breaking. "Wendy, it's okay."

She scurried forward and slowly raised her hands to his face, ran her fingers across his cheek, teardrops rolling down her own. There was no blood, but it stung. He knew it would bruise. A nerve below his eye was twitching and he couldn't suppress it. "Dipper," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," was all he could say. He wanted her to know that he understood, that he knew what was wrong, but he couldn't find the words and he wasn't about to try and comfort her with his hands.

Wendy crawled across the mattress and tore the lid off the cooler. She took out a bag of ice cubes and pressed it against Dipper's cheek, and as soon as Dipper held it in place, she started fumbling by the side of the mattress, pulled out her dress and slipped it back on. Dipper watched her jump out of the van, heard her boots against the dirt as she strode back over to the table and shut off the music they had been dancing to not a half hour earlier. She kept bringing things over from the table and depositing them in the cardboard boxes, and Dipper wanted to tell her to stop, to slow down, but he had no idea what was running through her head so he kept quiet; when she brought the grill over to the van, she looked at him, forlorn, exhausted, and after a moment he took the cue that he needed to get out of the van.

The drive home was much of the same – he thought of so many things to say and said none of them, the frustration with himself building to the point of clenching and unclenching his fists, biting his lip. It should have been easy. He should have been able to comfort his girlfriend when she needed to be comforted, but so rarely was that the case that he didn't know where to start. The van wound its way down the mountain, headlights shining on the grass, bushes, and trunks of pine trees lining the road.

"I'm not mad at you," Dipper eventually said. "Or anything."

"I know. You're too good to be mad at me."

"So you know that I would never, ever do anything to hurt you. I'd never even think of it."

"I know," she said, her voice barely hearable over the quiet drone of the van. "I do know that."

 _But I'm a man_ , Dipper thought. _And other men have hurt her_.

They came to a stop outside the Mystery Shack, but Wendy didn't shut off the engine. Normally when they were on a date and she drove, she stayed overnight in the attic, cuddled up to Dipper despite the sometimes unpleasant stickiness that the summer induced. Dipper couldn't imagine either of them sleeping if they slept alone that night, after the punch and the silence, so he asked her if she wanted to stay.

"I think I need to be alone right now," she said. "It isn't your fault. It's mine." For the first time since they'd left Lookout Point, she looked at him. She leaned over the console and kissed his cheek – the unbruised one. She told him he loved him, he said he loved her too, and then he got out of the van, watched her drive away, climbed the stairs to his room, went to bed alone, and tossed and turned in the stale, hot air into the early hours of the morning, replaying everything in his head, trying to piece together how one of the best nights of his life had crumbled apart.


	5. Chapter 5

The sun was high in the sky, beaming down on the clearing that the Corduroy cabin sat in. It had been a dry month, and the dirt below Dipper's feet was cracked all the way along the driveway. Dan didn't notice Dipper until he stepped onto the yellowing lawn, and his glare was as cold and unflinching as ever, but Dipper couldn't let that deter him, because it had been two weeks.

Two weeks since his girlfriend had punched him. The bruise had healed quick, and had only hurt when he washed his face in the shower. He told Stan he had been in a fight at the Skull Fracture, which he assumed the old man would have shrugged off, but instead Stan sat him down on the couch and made him promise he was taking his medicine, asked him if he needed to return to psychotherapy, threatened to call his parents if it happened again. His uncle didn't appear to care for Dipper's well-being all too often, but when he did, he was persistent.

The morning after it happened, Wendy had come over and hugged him for an eternity, but she hadn't said anything, and that was the problem he was still faced with. Wendy walked and talked like she was the queen of Gravity Falls, like she was invincible, and now Dipper knew that that wasn't true – there was a chapter of her life that Dipper had never been aware of. Only once, since the night at Lookout Point, had he gently reminded her that she could tell him anything, but she had fallen silent for a moment, eyes fixed on the road, and said, "there's nothing to tell," in exactly the kind of way that told him there _was_ something to tell. 

And Dipper knew, of course, that it was a sensitive subject, and he would never hound his girlfriend for a story she wasn't willing to tell, but he also knew that he didn't fare well being kept in the dark, a trait that was obvious if you peered into his room at 3 A.M. and saw him lying on the wooden floor, his hands pressed to his temples, periodically reaching up and flicking on the lamp by the bed that was too hot to sleep in, jotting something down in his notebook, anything he could remember from the thousands of conversations he had had with Wendy that might hint at the missing piece of history, scrawls and scribbles he would look over in the morning and shake his head at and decide must have been the ramblings of a madman who had snuck into the attic in the middle of the night.

It was easier than admitting _he_ was the madman.

Dan was in his chair on the porch, in a white tank top, patches of sweat under his arms. He didn't have a beer in his hand yet, just a pitcher of water balancing on the railing, so he might have been more open to talking than normal. Dipper walked right up the steps, and stood next to the open front door. "I know you hate my guts, but I need to talk to you about something."

He lowered his eyebrows, and beads of sweat trickled into the crease on his forehead. "Is that right?"

"It's about Wendy. Obviously."

"Go on."

Dipper looked out into the woods, squinted against the brightness, and searched for how best to phrase what he wanted to say. He hadn't planned on reaching this point in the conversation. "Has she been distant with you lately?"

"Distant?"

"Yeah, like, not talking as much. I know she's been spending more time in her room, does she talk to you at all?"

He scratched his beard. "I haven't noticed anything different. Why?"

"Well, she's been distant with me. And I know why, I'm pretty sure, but I don't know... why."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're bad at talking?"

"What?"

"You're bad at it. It's like everything you want to say, you don't have the confidence to say it. It's uncomfortable to watch."

Dipper was more astounded than angry. "Well, to be honest, Dan, you're not the easiest person to talk to yourself."

"Then why are you here?"

"I'm not here to chit-chat, I'm here because I'm worried about your daughter and you're the only person that might know more about her than I do."

He scratched his chin again and shrugged. "Alright. Go on."

"Look, I'm not gonna sugar coat it. We've been dating a while now. We've talked about taking things to... you know, we've been talking about... you know what I'm trying to say." He nearly gagged on the word, but he said, "sex. Except, when we, um, tried, she couldn't. And I kinda pieced together that someone must have... done something to hurt her. At some point in the past." Only when Dipper heard himself out loud did he begin to question the sanity behind asking a man why his daughter wouldn't have sex with him, but that was how his overly inquisitive mind worked. Shoot first, berate himself later. "Do you know anything about that?"

By the look on Dan's face, Dipper had overstepped, and for the fifth time since arriving he considered bolting into the woods, but Dan sighed and rubbed his forehead and said, "yeah, I know something about that." He stood up, the chair creaking below him, he towered over Dipper, stretched his back, and nodded at the front door. "Go on in. Have a seat."

Dipper had not misheard – Dan Corduroy had just invited him into his home. He even offered Dipper a drink, but Dipper said no. Dan sauntered into the kitchen adjoining the living room and took a beer out of the fridge, chugged what must have been half the can by the time he had sat down, in the armchair opposite the couch. For a moment, Dan stared at the coffee table between them, which was riddled with mail and magazines and left very little room for coffee. He set his beer atop a white envelope, and droplets of water descended the can and soaked into the paper. Dipper took the time to survey the room, a room he had never spent much time in or paid attention to over the years – it had purely acted as a passage to Wendy's bedroom. The most modern thing in the cabin was the plasma television beside Dan's armchair; other than that, the furniture was a mustard yellow with a brown floral pattern encompassing it, the dining set was made of wood, and lining one entire wall was a wooden cabinet with tessellated glass panes that reminded Dipper of a church window, without the color, and behind the glass was an array of white and blue porcelains, more plates and cups and bowls than any average family would ever need, all also adorned with floral patterns. He got the sense that the decor was all the work of Wendy's mom, though he knew very little about the woman, and that Dan and his family had preserved the cabin in her memory. 

"She met a boy in college," Dan said. "Cameron... something-or-other. I forget the name. She came home at Thanksgiving – this was in her first semester – and she told us all about him. Clearly in love with the guy. They got together just before Christmas, and I was really happy for her. Wendy, she's always had trouble fitting in, god bless her, even if she never cared about it. As soon as she went away to college she fell out of contact with her friends from high school. I don't think she ever got along with them that well."

Dipper glanced down at his hands, stopped himself from biting a nail. He couldn't recall the last time he had spoken to his friends from back home. In fact, he realized he had missed a couple of birthday texts just in the last two months.

"So I was glad she was making friends down there. Glad she'd found a boyfriend." He paused, eyes glazed over, cast down at the floor. "Then one day – in March, I think – she comes home from Denver. Unannounced. Just pulls up in a taxi outside, uses her key to get in, and goes straight to her room and shuts the door. I was sitting right here at the time. I panicked, because something must have been wrong, so I get up and I go open her door. She's laying in her bed, facing away from me, and I go to put a hand on her shoulder but she flinches, and brings her knees up to her chest. So I went around to the other side of the bed. I was shouting at her, I think, to tell me what was wrong, which was the worst thing I could have done. The second time I tried to touch her shoulder she hit me–" He pointed to his cheek – "right here. After that I just sat at the end of her bed till she stopped crying, and after a few hours she sat up and told me what happened. This Cameron guy, he raped her. He came to her dorm room really early in the morning, drunk from the night before. Kept trying to get her to go to bed with him, but she wouldn't. So he forced himself on her. Soon as it was over, she took the first bus away from campus and spent all day traveling back here."

Dan's face twisted in disgust. He reached for his beer and drank the rest of the can, crushed it in his palm, and in a surprising display of manners, covered his mouth when he belched. Then, he spat on the floor. "Sorry," he said. "Every time I talk about this shit I want to go kill him."

"What did you do?" Dipper asked. "When she told you."

"Well, I went to go kill him. Didn't make it to my car, though. Wendy ran ahead of me and took my keys and I wasn't about to wrestle them off her."

"What did she do after that? Did she move back home?"

"She stayed here about a week. Then she came in here and told me she needed to get back to her classes, so I drove her back. You know Wendy. She's strong. She wasn't about to let one guy scare her away from her education."

"But she dropped out," Dipper said. "In her second year."

"That wasn't anything to do with him. At least as far as I know. In fact, he transferred to a different school after Wendy's freshman year."

"Wait, he didn't get arrested?"

"Not that I ever heard of."

"But you called the police, right?"

"Yeah, and I filed a report. Never heard of it going anywhere."

"What do you mean, 'going anywhere?' All they had to do was find the guy on campus and arrest him."

He stood up and cracked his neck. "Kid, now you're asking me things I couldn't ever know." He went to the fridge and got another drink, and puttered around in the kitchen. 

Dipper picked at the skin on his lip and thought back to Doug Tanner and Cindy Bell, the year-long case of he said, she said, which, judging from his Facebook profile, had done no permanent damage to Doug's reputation – he was a quarterback at a university in Austin, Texas, and he had found a new group of people to worship him. The fact that any of these people could jump around the country, serially ruining lives while thriving in their own made Dipper sick to his stomach. "This is why you hate me," he said.

Dan sunk back into his chair. "I don't hate you. Wendy didn't date another guy the whole time she was in college. It was, what, two years till she got with you? She could have brought home Jesus Christ himself and I would have looked at him the same way I looked at you."

"Don't you think that's kind of insulting?" Dipper blurted out. "When have I ever given you the impression that I'd hurt your daughter?"

He shook his head. "It's like I said. I don't see whoever you are as a person, son, all I see is another man who might hurt my little girl."

Dipper shook Dan's hand and left the Corduroy residence unsatisfied with the newfound knowledge, but somewhere between there and Main Street, he realized that that was sort of the point. There _was_ no satisfying ending to Wendy's story, certainly no just ending, because even if a rapist was behind bars, the damage had already been done. Wendy couldn't trust Dipper. Not fully, anyway. And it pained him to know that around the world, at this very minute, there were more people being robbed of their trust, their comfort, their bodies, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. And as he thought about this, the hopelessness of it all, he switched over to autopilot, and all he knew was that he wanted to see his girlfriend, and to never again mention the things that ate her up inside, if that was what it would take to keep her happy.

He stopped by the flower shop and picked out a bouquet of tulips, wrapped them in red paper, and only offered non-committal responses to the chatty lady behind the counter. He walked down the street to the bowling alley, enveloped by the coolest AC in town as he pushed open the door, pop music loud over the speakers but unintelligible behind the sounds of falling pins. Wendy was in the middle of the ring-shaped counter between the bar and the arcade, her friend Kelsey sitting on it, beside the cash register, both of them in their red and blue polo shirts and black pants. Kelsey pointed at Dipper and Wendy turned around, a smile pushing at her cheeks. He passed her the flowers over the counter and she cocked her head. 

"What did you do?" she said. "Did you break something?"

"No," Dipper said. "Unless you count the record I just broke for being the best boyfriend."

"I don't know about _that_. Maybe if you got your hair cut you'd be in the running." She took off his cap and ruffled his curls, then leaned forward and kissed him. "These are pretty. Thank you. But seriously, what did you do?"

"I didn't do anything. I've just been thinking about you a lot today and... thinking about all the things you deserve. Flowers being the least of those things."

She reached out and traced a zig-zag pattern along his arm with her finger. "You're sweet. I get off in fifteen minutes if you wanna hang out."

"Yeah, I thought we could go for a walk or something."

"Sounds good. Do you want some quarters for the arcade?"

"Yes please."

She rolled her eyes, grinned, and emptied her wallet of coins on the counter. Dipper scooped them up, changed the smaller denominations into quarters, spent a few minutes on the rigged crane game in the arcade, failed to win a Pikachu, and Wendy dragged him away and they stepped out into the sunshine and walked over to the lake, sweaty palms pressed together.

They sat on the sand at the far end of the beach and looked out over the water, shut their eyes against the sinking sun, resting their heads against one another. Dipper nearly fell asleep but Wendy squirmed and said she couldn't sit there any longer or her legs would bake, so they went back to the Shack and she dug around in the clothes she kept in Dipper's wardrobe, changed into denim shorts and a t-shirt, then fell asleep in his bed with the fan keeping her cool and making strands of her hair flutter upwards and tickle Dipper's arm. In his notebook, Dipper outlined a fantasy story about a girl who could turn her hair into flames, and reach up to her head then cast fireballs from her hands, a girl who, as a child, was molested by a prince, and the prince grew up to become an esteemed king, and the girl bands together with other characters from her village and plots to storm the king's castle to take revenge.

He glanced down at Wendy, lying on her back, her hands on her stomach, the peaceful complexion of her face, and he knew that if they had never become more than friends, never become intimate, then he would have lived his whole life without ever learning of the demons concealed within her. They would have never shown themselves if he hadn't provoked them.

For a few days, it seemed as if things had returned to normal. She didn't have that faraway look in her eyes when they were talking, she made jokes at his expense and punched him on the arm, never hard enough to hurt, although he knew now she certainly had the power to. But two nights running in mid-August, he called her in the afternoon and asked if she wanted to go out, and she said no. He asked her what she was doing, and she said she wasn't doing anything – only lying in bed, watching TV. They normally did that together, Dipper thought, but he didn't voice his concern, just told her he loved her and hung up the phone.

After the second rejection, he paced around his room for five minutes, called Mabel, and recited the story he had heard from Dan. He had wanted to tell her since the moment he stepped out of the Corduroys' cabin – it was a constant urge, bubbling under his skin, but he had pushed it aside; he appreciated his sister's wisdom, especially when it came to relationships, but he couldn't necessarily rely on her discretion.

"You can't tell _anyone,_ " Dipper said.

"Of course I won't," Mabel said. "Who would I even tell? Nobody here knows who she is."

Dipper sat on his bed and picked at a loose thread on his sock. "What should I do?"

"Well, it sounds like she needs some time to herself. She went through something traumatic and you did something to remind her of that trauma. Through no fault of your own, of course. I think you need to give her some space until she stops seeing you as... you know, a reminder of that other guy."

"But how will I know when that happens?"

"She'll reach out to you. You already said it's unlike her to not text or call. So wait for her to call."

He _appreciated_ his sister's advice, but he didn't always conform to it. The following night he paced the room again, this time with his thumb hovering over Wendy's name on his phone, after twenty-four hours without contact. He hadn't realized until now how much he relied on Wendy's company to occupy his time, and how much he relied on her happiness to pacify his mind. Without her, his day felt like a string of tedious and ultimately meaningless tasks. Unpack this box, stock this shelf, paint this sign. He was confronted with the sobering realization that Wendy wasn't _a_ reason to stay in Gravity Falls, she was _the_ reason, and for the first time in a year, he felt a little homesick. 

He stood still, and the attic was so quiet that he thought he could hear his own heart, pounding against his ribcage. He pressed her name, then _Call._

She picked up on the third ring. "Hey."

"Hey," he said. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Are you?"

"I'm fine. I was just gonna ask if you wanted to do anything tonight, but you sound pretty tired already."

She hummed into the receiver. "I am. I'm sorry."

"It's okay, you don't have to apologize. I just, um–" he squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose – "did I do something wrong? I'm sorry, you probably don't want to answer that right now, but I gotta know. I'm driving myself crazy."

"No," she said, her voice wavering. "No, Dipper. You've only ever done everything right."

A few seconds of silence. "Okay, because I know you already said that what happened up at Lookout Point wasn't my fault, but I–" he heard his own voice go unsteady – "I'm so sorry if I hurt you, Wendy. I never meant–"

"God, no, Dipper, listen to me. None of that was your fault. None of anything is. It's me." She exhaled. "I had a bad experience. Once. With a guy."

"Your dad told me. I mean, I kinda figured that was the case, but you said there was 'nothing to tell,' and I know I was invading your privacy, but I had to know. So I went and talked to your dad. He told me what happened." He leaned his forehead against the one window in the attic, small raindrops tapping the glass on the other side, the sky a thick gray. "Wendy?"

Her voice was quieter. "What did he tell you?"

"He told me about Cameron. About the day you traveled home from college. And what Cameron did."

Again, silence, and then, "you said something the other day. Something like 'all the things I deserve.' Have you ever stopped to think about what you deserve? Because it's something more than me. I mean, I punched you in the face, Dipper, and here you are, calling me, trying to apologize because you thought you hurt _me._ "

He frowned and shook his head. "That wasn't your fault. Why does that matter?"

"Because it isn't just that I hit you. I'm messed up, Dipper. There's so much going on in my head, and maybe I do a good job at hiding it, but there are things about me that you shouldn't have to deal with."

"Are you breaking up with me?"

"No. I'm advising you to break up with me."

"Well, I'm not gonna do that. Wendy, where is all this coming from?"

"Just something I've been thinking about." She sounded bored. "I don't know if I'm ever going to be the things you want. The things you see in me."

"You already are _everything_ I want. Haven't I made that pretty clear already?" He waited. "Wendy?"

"Listen, I've gotta go. I'm really sorry. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

He scratched his head, trying to balance Mabel's advice with his impulse to keep digging. "Okay," he said.

"I love you, Dipper."

"Love you too."

The phone beeped twice; he held it to his ear for a few seconds, then set it down on his nightstand. His blood was pumping, head swimming, and he knew, somewhere in the back of his mind he knew, that he shouldn't have grabbed his keys, and he shouldn't have gone out to his car. He knew that he had felt like Wendy before – there had been days that he'd wanted nothing more than to shut out the world. In his mind's eye, he saw himself stepping off the porch and walking across the dirt to his green Fiesta, but he was powerless to stop himself.

There were a lot of things, that night, that he should not have done.

The engine growled to life, and before he took off, the porch light came on, and he shielded his eyes and looked over at the Shack, thinking that Stan must have heard his feet pounding down the stairs and was coming out to ask where he was going, but the door remained closed. The light was on a timer. 9 P.M. He pulled out onto the winding road into town, running a hand through his hair, sifting through the things he could say when Wendy answered the door, and then the things he could say if Dan answered the door.

And then he pulled up at a stop sign. A pair of headlights approached from his left. And as the vehicle passed through his own lights, he saw the unmistakable red flannel paint job of the Escape Van and his stomach sank. He gripped the wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white, debated what to do for a second, before realizing that obviously he was going to follow her. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and joined the main road, picked up his speed, chased the two red lights, but she was speeding herself, and when they came up to the bend just before the turning to her house, she had trouble keeping on the right side of the road. If there wasn't a gallon of adrenaline coursing through his veins, he might have thought back to their phone call, and pictured her taking it outside the bar, and only hanging up on him so she could go back inside and get another drink.

She didn't use her turn signal – just swung into the dirt road leading to her driveway. Dipper didn't follow. He pulled over on the grass, in exactly the same spot he had parked the van when he brought it to Wendy – the tire tracks were still there. He got out and scampered through the woods, out onto the dirt road, crouching, though he was under the cover of darkness. About a hundred feet away, just visible in the light from the porch, the van's driver side door swung open and Dan Corduroy stumbled out. He slammed it behind him and staggered to the porch, stopped to rest against one of the wooden posts for a second, then climbed the steps in one quick motion, as if afraid he would collapse if he took it any slower. He let himself inside. Nobody else got out of the van.

Dipper let out a breath he must have been holding for the last five minutes. Off to the side of the house, he could see yellow light shining on the trunks of the pine trees, so he knew Wendy was in her room, but a father who was drunk enough to drive like a blind man on steroids was an obstacle he had not accounted for. He forced his premonitions aside and went up to the front door. But before he knocked, he heard Dan's booming voice call out Wendy's name, and then a second time. He could even hear Dan's shoes thumping on the floorboards, heading toward Wendy's room.

The porch creaked when Dipper backed away, down the steps. He ran along the wall of the house, around the corner, and ducked just below Wendy's window. Slowly, he raised his head and peered inside, but Dan was standing in the doorway, and Dipper flung himself to the side and sat back against the wall. He watched the projected square of light against the trees, expecting Dan to come to the window and cast a hulking shadow, but he didn't. Dipper looked down and watched his own chest rise and fall, swallowed a metallic taste, pressed two fingers to his temples. Only now did he become aware that spying was undermining their foundation of trust, but he couldn't leave without knowing she was okay. All he needed was to see her smile, even a little bit, and he would leave.

When he next looked, Dan was sitting on the end of Wendy's bed, crying. Dipper struggled to make sense of the scene – Wendy wasn't hurt, like he had initially thought, she was sat against the headboard, watching her dad with a look that was somewhere between sympathy and exasperation. Then, she crawled forward on her knees and put a hand on his shoulder. Dan wiped his eyes.

Though he didn't know it at the time, what followed was an image that Dipper would wish to scrub from his memory for the rest of his life.

Dan turned around and kissed his daughter on the cheek. She clenched her eyes shut. He laid one meaty palm on her shoulder, and she jumped up and moved to leave her room, but Dan was even faster than she was, and he grabbed her arm and pinned her against the wall. Dipper felt every last drop of blood drain from his face.

When he was thirteen, Dipper had accidentally come across a dark corner of the internet, and before he could comprehend where he was, he was watching a video of a man being shot on CCTV, in a convenience store. The sinking feeling in his gut when he powered off his computer was akin to the feeling he had now – a combination of something that should never, ever happen, and something that nobody should ever have to watch.

Dan cupped Wendy's face in his hands, ran strands of her hair through his fingers. He kissed her, on the lips, kept kissing her, and Wendy's eyes were shut tight and Dipper could see the tears rolling down her cheeks. She kept thrusting her arms out to push him away, but he snapped them back against the wall until she gave up, and stopped resisting. He squeezed her breast through her shirt.

Dipper's mind flashed back to New Year's Eve, Dan's arm around Wendy by the bonfire. The things Wendy told Dipper. _He's been getting worse. He sees so much of Mom in me._

He felt his legs give way underneath him, and he fell to the dirt like a rag doll, then pushed himself back to his feet and staggered to the nearest tree, leaned against it and vomited into a pile of leaves. It was loud, and he covered his mouth but the memory was still there, etching itself into his brain, and that was enough to make him throw up again. He breathed heavily, his throat stinging, and when he caught the sour smell in his nostrils he walked away, back around to the front of the house. He spat on the lawn, twice, three times, and he wanted to run back to his car and wash out his mouth with the bottle of water in the cupholder but he couldn't leave her in there a second longer, so he clambered up the steps and rapped on the front door. He checked his shirt and his shoes but they were clean; he took a step back from the door so they wouldn't smell sick on his breath.

It was Dan who answered. His eyes were puffy and he had to clear his throat after he said, "hey, Dipper."

Dipper barely heard him. His ears were ringing. He could suddenly hear his own blood pumping – it felt more like he was sailing along a blood vessel than standing on a porch, in reality. Every instinct he had to lunge at the man and beat him to death, he smothered. "Hey, Dan. How's your evening going?"

"Not so bad. You here to see Wendy?"

"Yes, please. If she's home."

Dan called out her name again; he wandered away toward the kitchen and then Wendy was there, in the doorway. She looked relieved. "Dipper," she said, stepping out on the porch and hugging him. Suddenly he felt wrong holding her, like he didn't have the right, like she belonged to somebody else, which he supposed was the notion that Dan had been trying to instill in him for the last eight months. Wendy held Dipper at arm's length and looked him up and down. "You okay?"

"Yeah."

"What are you doing here?"

"Wondered if you wanted to go for a drive."

"Sure," she said, which made things a lot easier. She stepped back inside and took her coat from the rack and called out, "Dad. I'm going out."

They stepped down onto the driveway and Wendy exhaled into the night. "Wait, where's your car?"

"I parked out on the road." He tried to walk straight, but the dirt didn't feel even below his feet.

"Sure you're okay, dude?"

"Yeah."

When they got to the car, he sunk into the seat, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and chugged the water in the cupholder. He could see Wendy watching him, out of the corner of his eye, but he kept facing forward. Started the engine. Hit the road.

"Where are we going?" she asked, and Dipper realized that he didn't know where they were going. He had turned onto the road that went south out of Gravity Falls and they were cruising along at fifty, but Dipper couldn't remember making a conscious decision about either of those things.

He turned his head and looked in her eyes. "I can take you away from here," he said, and snapped his eyes back to the road. "I can take you anywhere. Anywhere that isn't here."

She was silent for a moment. "What are you talking about?"

"We'll move to the other side of the country. We don't have to tell anyone our address."

He looked over again and her mouth was open; she knew that he knew. She swallowed, set her eyes forward. "You saw. You were spying on me. That's messed up, Dipper."

" _That's_ messed up? _Spying_ on you was messed up?"

"Yes!" she screamed. "You weren't _ever_ supposed to know. I tried to tell you, didn't I? I tried to tell you I was screwed up. And you had to go and fucking dig around for clues, like you always do. And now you've _ruined_ this. You've ruined us. You'll never be able to look at me the same way again."

"Jesus, Wendy, will you forget about me for a second and focus on what's important, here? We have to get you out of that house. We have to call the police."

"We're not going to the police."

"What?"

"We are _not_ going to the police."

"Wendy, he's _abusing_ you."

"If we go to the police then he'll go to prison and I still need him. He's still my dad."

He opened his mouth but couldn't find anything to say. With tears in his eyes, the road was a blur, but it was straight and they hadn't seen another car since they left her house.

"I'd like you to take me home now," she said.

"Wendy, you can't be serious," he pleaded.

"I want to go home, Dipper."

"I'm not taking you back there. I can't."

"He won't do it again. He always regrets it afterward. He'll wait on the couch all night for me to come home so he can tell me he's sorry."

"That doesn't make it _okay_ , Wendy!"

"I know! I know it doesn't, but god dammit, I'm not losing him too." She started to sob. "I already lost my mom and I'm not losing him too."

He listened to her crying, carried on at the same speed, chewed on the skin on his lips until they bled. Thoughts were a clutter in his head; he was compiling a list of all the places they could flee to, while weighing up the risk of staying in Gravity Falls until they had the means to do so. He needed a concrete plan, but he needed time to build it, and unfortunately that would also give his girlfriend time to be traumatized by her own father.

Again, not totally aware of what he was doing, he swung the car around, tires screeching, and headed back the way they had come from.

She sniffled. "Are you taking me home?"

"Yep." And because the drive would be about five minutes, he had some time to get to know her dad a little better. "How long has he been doing this?"

"Um... I don't know. I think it started about a year ago."

"How often?"

"Maybe... once a month?" She stared at him. "Are you on the phone to the police?"

"No."

"Give me your phone."

As if _he_ was the one she couldn't trust. He pulled his phone from his pocket and passed it to her. She lit up the screen, tapped a couple of buttons, realized he wasn't lying. 

"He'll stop," she said. "I promise you. I'm gonna tell him that you know. That I told you. And that if he does it again, you and me will go to the police together."

"Okay." His breaths were getting lighter and he had stopped trembling. It seemed that with every second that passed, it became clearer to him that everything was going to be okay. "There was no guy in college, right? He made that up."

"Yeah."

"And when I mentioned the guy from college you went along with it."

"Because it was infinitely less fucked up than the truth."

Dipper suppressed a violent grimace. To think he had looked the devil in the eyes and shaken his hand. "Are you okay?" he said.

"What?"

"Did he hurt you?"

She rolled her shoulders. "A little."

A thick silence came over them. He noticed that Wendy kept looking across at him, but she didn't speak until they were near to the turning for her house. "Promise me you won't call the police," she said.

"Why don't you stay at the Shack tonight? Then you can make sure I don't."

"I can't. He isn't a monster, Dipper, he's sick. You have no idea what Mom's death did to him. He'll be waiting up for me, and I'll tell him that you know about him now, so he'll have to stop."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. And what if he kills me, Wendy?"

She hesitated. "What?"

"You said he was sick, right? If you tell him I know his darkest secret, that I know enough to send him to prison, what if he kills me? If he's _sick_ enough to molest his own daughter, killing me would be _easy_. He already hates me."

"He doesn't hate you."

"Yeah?" He switched on his turn signal for the dirt road and looked his girlfriend in the eyes. "I guarantee you, when I turn this corner, he'll be waiting at the end of the driveway. And when you get out of the car he'll stare me down because he hates me, because he can't stand that he has to _share_ you with me. Just watch."

Dipper kept the high beams on and turned into the road and sure enough, there he was, beside the stack of firewood at the side of the cabin, his arms folded. Dipper laughed. "There he is! I told you."

"Okay, you're scaring me now."

"I'm scaring you." He chuckled again. "Okay, I'll stop."

As the car trundled along the driveway, Dipper took a deep, satisfying breath, and smiled. It was still true – women were being sexually assaulted all over the globe, and men were getting away with it, and there wasn't a whole lot he could do. But he could make the world a marginally better place, in this very moment. 

Everything was going to be okay.

He didn't slow the car to a stop – he put his foot down. He was pressed back against his seat as the car surged forward, and Wendy screamed at him, asked what he was doing.

And here's the thing about Dan Corduroy – yes, he was tough, but he was a brute. He wasn't intelligent. In the last few seconds of his life, it was entirely possible that he thought, _yeah, I can survive this. I can survive anything_. A fraction of a second before the impact, before the _thump_ , he uncrossed his arms and met his daughter's eyes with a look of sheer terror, his eyes flew open, almost to a comical degree. Then his face hit the windshield – it would later become a vivid memory for Dipper, though if he'd blinked he would have missed it – his body rolled over the roof, and landed in the dirt. Dipper slammed his foot on the brake pedal as the dirt road gave way to the woods. They rumbled over twigs, rocks, pine cones, and hit a tree head-on, but they were far enough away from the cabin that the car had time to decelerate, and though Dipper and Wendy both lurched forward, neither of them hit anything. In the seconds of quiet, as they caught their breath, Dipper's only thought was that Bud Gleeful had ripped him off – this car didn't have any airbags.

Wendy shrieked, and threw open the door. She got out and Dipper stayed seated. The tree they had hit was inches from his face, and he could see the patterns in the bark. The headlights were still on and smoke rose from the hood. What captured Dipper's attention, though, was the crack in his windshield that Dan's head had made. It was like a spiderweb, or a snowflake, only less symmetrical. Crimson blood ran in a little stream from the roof, down the windshield, and slowly filled in every crack with red. It was beautiful and horrific.

And then he woke up – not literally, but everything clicked at once in his head, the rage subsided, and he realized that he had just committed a crime, and that the consequences of that crime would be significantly worse if the man he had hit was dead. "Oh, fuck," he murmured. "Oh, _fuck_." 

He got out of the car and ran back through the brief stretch of woods, slipped on a slick patch of mud that the tires had made, but stayed upright. Dan was lying face-up on the driveway, motionless, his head caked in blood, one leg bent in the wrong direction. Wendy was pacing up and down next to him, her face in her hands.

"Wendy, I'm sorry," Dipper said. "I didn't mean to." Like they were on the playground and he'd broken one of her dolls.

She rushed over to him, and he didn't throw up his hands to brace himself because he deserved whatever pain she wanted to inflict on him. But she gripped his arms and asked him if he was okay, which was mystifying.

"I'm fine," he said, looking over her shoulder. "Is he–"

"Yeah," she said, her voice steady and strangely soothing. "Yeah, he's dead."

He reached for his phone, but she hadn't given it back to him in the car. "My phone. I'll call the police."

"No. No, no, no. You need to get out of here. You need to get out of here and get as far away as possible."

"Wendy, I can't–" he heard the front door of the cabin creak open and froze. Wendy inched closer, held on to him, and when she looked over her shoulder, her brother, Kevin, came around the corner of the cabin. Dipper's face fell. Had he been home the whole time?

"What's going on?" Kevin said, looking between them and his father's corpse, eyes wide. "Dad?" He knelt at his side, put a hand on his chest.

"You need to go," Wendy said to Dipper. "Now."

Tears sprung to his eyes. "I can't just leave you here."

In the background, Kevin sobbed and begged his sister to tell him what had happened.

She ignored him. "You either leave now or you stay here and spend the rest of your life in jail. You're leaving me either way."

He breathed deep – hyperventilated, more like – and stared into her beautiful, grief-stricken eyes. He looked over his shoulder and noticed, for the first time, that their color matched the green of his wrecked car.

"Take the van," she said, and thrust the keys into his palm, along with his phone. By now, Kevin had wandered into the woods, followed the tire tracks, and turned, his jaw unhinged. "Go," Wendy shouted, hitting Dipper's chest.

He didn't hesitate – he ran for the van and clambered into the driver seat. As he started the engine, he saw Wendy restraining Kevin by the arms. He was kicking his legs and screaming at her to let him go, screaming at Dipper that if he ever saw him again, he'd kill him.

Dipper took one last look at his girlfriend, one last mental snapshot, before – it dawned on him – he had to live the rest of his life without her. He took off along the driveway, and because he had to veer around the man he had just murdered, he drove up on the perfectly trimmed lawn he was always afraid of ruining. Maybe he'd knock over their mailbox, too, just to really fuck their lives up.

Before joining the main road, he sat gripping the wheel, tears streaming down his cheeks, grinding his teeth together. He wanted to turn left, go home, go to his bed in the attic and wake up in the morning and forget that this ever happened. He would work double shifts, every day, including weekends, and grow old and inherit the Shack and become the next Stan Pines. If this was a nightmare, then it should have been over, by now, but he waited a few seconds longer, held out hope, clenched his eyes shut, but when he opened them again he was still staring into the woods on the other side of the road, and he still only had one option.

He turned right. He drove at sixty-five. The night was still, no wind, no clouds. The gas tank was nearly full. In his head, he brought up the list of places to flee to that he had brainstormed earlier, when he thought Wendy would be coming with him. The major decision, when he hit the Interstate at the end of the hilly straight, would be to go north or south, and he was thinking of somewhere cold. Remote. Like Alaska, but he didn't quite know how to get there. Could you just drive through Canada? He would have to stop and ask someone. And get some aspirin – his head was pounding. In fact, there might have been some in the back, with all the junk Wendy kept back there. He glanced behind him, between the gap in the seats, and saw that the bed was still there, and although that particular mattress only jogged painful memories, at least he would have somewhere comfortable to sleep, once he was far enough out of Oregon.

And in the exact moment he became hopeful that there was still a life ahead of him, he started to hear it. So faint at first that he could have easily been imagining it, but then a flash of light in the wing mirror caught his attention, and he saw the red and blue lights crest the hill behind him, and the delusion came crumbling down. Of course he couldn't have escaped. He was driving the only vehicle in the country with a flannel pattern on it, for fuck's sake. 

He picked up his speed, seventy, seventy-five, eighty. Suddenly he resented the mattress in the back instead of treasuring it. The sirens didn't get any louder, and the lights didn't come any closer – in fact, he might have been outrunning them. He tried to judge the distance, staring in the wing mirror, and then the next time he looked up, there were two new pairs of lights, parked sideways across the road.

And all the adrenaline drained out of his body at once. He loosened his grip on the wheel, sat back against the seat, and the van rolled to a stop some fifty feet before the roadblock. In one last-ditch attempt to hide, he shut off his headlights, cloaking himself in the night. In the silence, he noticed for the first time that the radio was on, playing _Rocket Man_ , and he shut his eyes against the flashlights shining through his windshield, tried to relax.

Then the door opened, he was dragged out of the vehicle, and Sheriff Blubbs yelled at him to stand up and put his hands behind his head.


	6. Chapter 6

The arc of red light on the horizon continued to shrink, and one by one, all of the lights in the courtyard flickered to life. They had another half hour before a warden would usher everyone back inside.

"Shit," Mitch murmured. Dipper didn't look at him, but he could assume Mitch was shaking his head and scratching his beard. Getting the man to shut up was a feat, and Mitch hadn't said a word through the last hour of Dipper's story. "So you're a murderer." He scoffed. "Didn't peg you for a murderer, Bigfoot. Maybe a... pedophile, or somethin'."

Dipper glowered at him. "Fuck off," he said.

"So hold on a second. If you killed a man, how come you ain't in for life?"

"I was only charged with voluntary manslaughter, after everyone found out what he'd been doing to her. Ten year sentence, out in eight for good behavior."

"Hold on, 'voluntary manslaughter?' That sounds a lot like murder to me."

"It's considered voluntary manslaughter if some kind of emotional distress leads you to do it. In my case, I'd just watched him... you know. Through the window."

"Well, shit. And that was the last time you saw her? Didn't she ever come to visit?"

"She did. Once."

"And what did she say?"

Even though it was eight years ago – three months into his sentence – it was one of Dipper's most recent memories. Lying in his cell, chewing cafeteria food, playing poker in the rec room – these things were all easily forgettable, leaving plenty of room in his head for the few times people had come to see him. The people he had shooed away. Wendy had walked in with her hands clasped at her front and approached the table slowly, as if afraid Dipper would crumble like a Jenga tower if she made any sudden movement. "She just started talking about normal things. She told me what her brothers were up to. And her friends from work. I wasn't really processing what she was saying, and then I snapped and told her to leave."

Mitch was apparently so invested in the story that that angered him. "What? Why?"

"Because when I killed her dad and left, I figured that was it. I'd spent three months coming to terms with the fact that I wouldn't ever see her again, and then she showed up out of the blue and acted like nothing had ever happened. I thought it was pretty obvious that she couldn't be friends with someone who murdered her father, but I guess she didn't agree."

"What did she do then?"

"Well, she left, when I told her to."

"Fucking hell, Bigfoot. You're crazier than I thought you were, turning away a girl like that."

"The hell are you talking about? You don't even know her."

"I think I know her pretty well, after everything you told me."

"Whatever. I wasn't 'turning her away,' I was saving her. If I was capable of killing somebody, then I couldn't trust myself to be anywhere near her. She's had enough... unstable men in her life. She deserved something better. Deserved to be around normal people."

"Have you heard anything about her? Do you know where she is? Other people must have come visit you, right? At least early on?"

"My parents came twice, but they could hardly look at me. My uncle came a few times. And my sister used to visit a lot. Last I saw her was five years ago, though. She said Wendy moved back to Colorado and she was studying again. Not sure what."

"Your sister as in your twin sister? Why did she stop coming?"

"Same reason as Wendy. I told her to. Mabel was a little more persistent, though."

Mitch lit up another cigarette, an orange glow on his face in the fading daylight. The guys down at the tables packed up their dominoes and wandered inside. "Wendy was the girl from your stories, wasn't she?"

Dipper nodded. It was a trilogy now – Willow, the redhead orphan from the village of Cameria, born the daughter of two magi, with an ability to turn her hair to flames and channel them with her hands. In the first book, she breached the castle in Nathos and slew the king who molested her as a child. In the second, she was crowned queen of Nathos. And in the third, she fell in love with her best friend, Neil – the first person in Cameria to join her on her quest – and through Neil, she learned to trust men again, discovered the joys of making love, and relinquished the terror. Dipper had been careful to make Neil as different from himself as possible, create somebody that truly deserved a heroine like Willow.

"So you were telling me things about your life all along, in your own Bigfoot way."

"I guess so."

They were quiet for a moment. Mitch sighed. "Reckon you'll get much sleep tonight?"

"Nope." Dipper stood up and stretched out all his joints. "Might as well turn in, though." He started to descend the metal benches, down to the baseball field, his steps echoing around the empty courtyard.

Mitch called out from behind him, "you're up at six A.M., ain't ya?"

"Yep."

"That's it? No goodbye? No 'thank you?'"

Dipper turned and smirked up at him. "What would I thank you for?"

"For... I don't know. The good times?"

"If you consider anything that's happened in here 'good times,' you need to get outside more." He climbed back up the bleachers and shook Mitch's hand. "A handshake sort of implies mutual respect, right? Neither of us should respect one another. We're both killers."

"What, d'you wanna kiss instead?" He took a drag on his cigarette. "Say I ever get out of here and I want to look you up. Where would I find you?"

"No idea. Depends on a lot of things. I still think about Alaska a lot. I can see myself in a cabin out in the wilderness. Windows in all four walls but all I can see for miles is snow and trees."

"Alaska's a big place."

"You can just assume this is the last time you'll see me, then."

He nodded and grinned. "Take care of yourself, Dipper."

Again, halfway to the bottom of the benches, Dipper stopped. He looked out over the ocean, the reflection of the moon, and at the lights gradually multiplying in Coos Bay. "Tell you what," he said. "One thing I will miss is the view."

"I hear they're better on the outside," Mitch said. "Less barbed wire."

***

Dipper sat on the wooden bench, and when the rumbling bus in front of him pulled out of its bay, the view of the opposite side of the street opened up – parking lots for the various stores and offices, mostly. The sidewalk was busy. A woman walked by with an empty stroller and two young boys trailed behind her, competing to jump between bricks without stepping on the cracks. Dipper tucked his feet under the bench to make room for a mobility scooter coming from the other direction. The sun kept peeking out from behind the clouds, showing itself for a few seconds, warming his face, but then disappearing again.

He looked to his left and spotted a bright red Coca-Cola machine a few benches down, bordering a patch of grass and a row of trees. He smiled to himself. As silly as it was, that was his first taste of freedom. Unsurprisingly, though, it was cash-only, and all Dipper had was the debit card he'd been given that morning with the balance he'd earned working the laundry room. The ATM was out of service, so he wandered back over to the ticket window and asked the lady behind the glass if he could get any cash if he gave her his card.

"I'm sorry, sir, we only offer cash-back if you're buying a ticket. Would you like to buy a ticket?"

Dipper hesitated, unsure if he should say anything. "I bought a ticket, like, five minutes ago, remember?"

"Okay, but I can give you cash-back if you buy another."

"Well... I don't really need to go anywhere else."

Her face twisted into an exaggerated wince. "Sorry."

"Okay. That's fine. Hey, can I get the time, please?"

"It is... eleven thirty-seven."

"Great. Thank you." He walked back over to the sidewalk and checked his ticket again. Medford to San Francisco, departing at 1:20 this afternoon. He glanced left, then right, and the street seemed to go on infinitely in both directions, no giant concrete walls to stop him, nobody posted up with a pistol or a baton, dedicated to watching his every move. The vending machine he could handle; this was a little overwhelming.

He chose left, back past the vending machine, past the row of trees. He crossed an intersecting road, passed a nondescript brick building on the corner, and then suddenly he entered a throng of people, whizzing between stores and cafés on either side of the street. For a few hundred steps, he was staring into the faces of people walking past, fascinated, really, that they all blended perfectly into society. He kept imagining their backstories, like he had with the people on the decks of distant cruise ships from the courtyard. One woman, on her cell phone, noticed him staring and frowned, and he ducked into a random store before he had a chance to creep someone out and break his parole in record time.

A bell above the door dinged when he stepped inside. It was a small, claustrophobic clothing store, sweaters and hoodies hung on the walls all the way to the ceiling, and baseball caps hanging from the ceiling itself. He couldn't step through the aisles without brushing the racks of shirts on either side, like pushing through bracken on a woodland trail. Natalie Imbruglia played quietly on the speakers overhead.

He hadn't planned on buying anything, until he thought about it and decided that the black sweater and camo pants he had been given the day before weren't even close to what he would have worn on the outside, eight years ago. He was flicking through a row of shirts when he heard a quiet, high-pitched voice behind him, and he jumped.

"Can I help you with anything, sir?" She was short, with wide eyes and neat brunette hair. Smiling. Couldn't have been any older than eighteen. And yet, she made him jump.

"I'm– I'm fine. Thank you."

"Okay." She lingered for a second, still smiling, then made a beeline for the checkout counter.

With his head turned away from her, he frowned at his own behavior. He had been fine talking to his parole officer that morning – in fact the interaction had been polite and friendly. If all he was going to do all day was stare at strangers and stammer at basic questions, he might as well have robbed the store and headed back to prison. At least there it was more appropriate to act like a creep.

He drew the curtain of the one fitting room in the store, which was more of a box than a room, and tried on a blue and green flannel shirt and some jeans. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of who he used to be, before becoming a convict, and he smiled, and with a burst of confidence he smiled at the girl behind the counter when he went to check out.

"Would you like a bag for that?"

"Yeah, please. Um, can I get ten dollars back in cash, too?"

"Sure." She bagged up the clothes and he paid thirty-nine dollars on his card. "Have a nice day," she said as he left the store, and when he was back out on the street, he wanted to turn around and go back inside to talk to her. She was friendly, and nobody else had entered the store while he was in there – she may not have had a whole lot of company. But again, he had trouble deciding whether that would have been considered unusual, so he erred on the side of caution and headed back to the bus station.

On his way, the smell of bacon lured him over to the other side of the street, to a bustling little café, with people sitting at metal tables on the sidewalk. Hunger wasn't a sensation he experienced all too often in prison – there was no point being hungry for prison food, because your stomach always ended up disappointed. He bought a sub with sausage and cheese and peppers, and wolfed down half of it before realizing it was the best thing he had eaten in years, and savored the rest.

And back at the vending machine, he inserted two dollars, pressed the button for Dr Pepper, and when he reached into the tray at the bottom, he pulled out two bottles of Dr Pepper. Somebody had just left one in the tray. He laughed to himself, took one and left the other, and then there was an hour of sitting and waiting. Luckily, he had become quite good at both of those things.

It took a total of ten hours to get to San Francisco. The bus stopped three times, various characters filtering in and out, but it was never more than a quarter full. It was dark long before they got to the city. They drove through his home town, Piedmont, and his heart raced when they passed the turning for his old neighborhood, thinking he might see his parents standing at the bottom of the road, or something, but they might not have even lived there anymore. They might not have been in the same town, the same state, or even the same country. He thought briefly about the possessions he had left behind in his childhood home, the things he hadn't deemed important enough to load into his pickup when he moved north. Books, magazines, band posters, old clothes, old toys. He wondered what his parents had done with them. Wouldn't want a murderer's belongings in your house, tainting the place.

Then they rolled out of Piedmont, downhill and over the bridge into the city. Dipper watched out the window as the brightly lit skyscrapers came into view, and once they were off the bridge, he expected to see more of San Francisco, but the bus passed a handful of gargantuan offices and apartment buildings and pulled up outside the bus station. It was kind of anticlimactic. 

When he stepped off the bus he asked the driver if there were any hotels nearby, and the driver gave him walking directions to a Holiday Inn a few blocks away. 

He asked at the front desk if he could buy a toothbrush and toothpaste, thinking it would raise all kinds of red flags, but the lady reached under the counter and gave him both for free, without a second glance. They didn't notice or care that he had no luggage, either.

It was 1 A.M. when he went to bed, and 4 A.M. when he got to sleep. The unending chatter, coughing, and breathing of inmates had kept him awake for years, and now the lack thereof was having the same effect. The silence was unnerving. He kept drifting to sleep then jolting awake again.

Up at 8. It took him a full minute, eyes cloudy and mind hazy, to remember where he was, and when he did recall, all he felt was a twinge of sadness. He showered for a half hour, wondering why he felt that niggling sadness, and landed on the decision that it was lonely, here, even though he had done as much talking that morning as he would have any morning in jail.

Breakfast perked him up. He loaded up his plate with bacon, eggs, hash browns, then half a watermelon and two croissants for dessert. He sat at a table for two by the window, and spent half the time ignoring the view of the street below and marveling at the warm, orange light flooding the hotel restaurant. He didn't think it could have been all natural light from the sunrise, it was too brilliant, but he couldn't come up with any other explanation, either. 

He rode the elevator up to his room, his stomach so full he could practically hear it jiggling, then lay back on the bed until his chest burned with indigestion.

And then he sat up, and it was time. Time to see his sister. 

He showered again, left his new clothes hanging in the bathroom for a while until they smelled less like bacon and more like soap. He stuffed the black sweater and the camo pants into the tiny waste paper basket under the glass table. He brushed his teeth, and left the toothbrush and toothpaste on the bathroom counter, because they wouldn't fit in his pockets without jutting out. The man at the checkout desk was as polite and disinterested as the lady who had checked him in the night before. Dipper didn't know if hailing taxis was a thing of the past – he had traveled eight years into the future, after all – so he asked the man behind the desk to call one for him. He sat on a white leather couch in the lobby and flicked through brochures for nearby tourist attractions. None of the words were registering, because he was too nervous, but if he didn't read something, if he left himself to his own hyperactive thoughts, then he knew that he would start tapping his foot, and start biting his nails, and perpetually survey the room to the point of being shifty enough to raise alarm, and somebody would come over and ask if he was alright, and if they were perceptive enough to notice that he was not alright then it would only be a matter of time before they realized he was a murderer, too.

Somebody called out his name and he started. It was the man at the desk, telling him his taxi was outside.

It was warm, but windy. He crossed a busy sidewalk and got in the back of the cab. He gave the driver the name of the street and they traveled west across the city, along a straight of apartment buildings and hotels and other businesses. With every red light they stopped at, the urge to jump out of the car and run became greater. He should have gone shopping for a phone charger – that way he could have phoned ahead, checked if he was even heading to the right address, and if Mabel didn't want to see him, it would have been easier on both of them if she said it over the phone. The taxi passed a set of iron gates and a plaque that said _Presidio,_ and suddenly they were surrounded by beautiful greenery, flowerbeds, and large cream-colored houses with utopian front lawns. It was so far away from what his life had become that none of it felt real. He didn't know how close they were, now, but it couldn't have been far. He wanted to ask the driver to cruise around the park for a couple of hours while he worked up some courage. The seat of the cab – and the warmth of the sunlight through the window – was just becoming comfortable, and far more comfortable than how the rest of his day would play out, surely. 

The taxi slowed to a stop at the foot of a hill and Dipper felt his insides squirm. On his right, a narrow road led up the hill, curving to the left, houses either side.

"This is it," the driver said, over his shoulder. "You sure you don't want me to go further up?"

"No, that's fine," Dipper said, unable to tear his eyes from the road.

"Eighteen twenty," the driver said. 

Dipper handed him a twenty from his wallet and mumbled "keep the change." The first thing he noticed, when the cab was out of sight, was how quiet it was. The hustle and bustle of the city had been replaced entirely by birdsong, and that, together with the cloudless sky, inspired enough optimism for Dipper to set aside his worries and start up the road. It was cracked and weathered, but the houses were modern and clean. As he passed he inspected the numbers beside the front doors, and stopped at 1610. It was semidetached. A spacious front lawn, neatly trimmed, a narrow concrete path cutting through it. No porch, but three steps up to the front door. The house backed onto another road, and behind that, woodland.

Still, there was no sign that she would be inside. No indication that she lived there. Dipper ambled up the path, his eyes on the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of somebody he didn't recognize, another family entirely, so that he would have an excuse to retreat to another hotel room, and investigate where she had moved to, and come up with something he could say when he first saw her.

Because when he rang the doorbell, he still didn't know what he was going to say.

And when she answered the door, and her jaw dropped open and she covered her mouth with her hands, tears flooding her stunned, motionless eyes, all that he said, in a weak, broken voice, was, "hey, Mabel."

She lunged forward and threw her arms around his neck, with force you wouldn't think her tiny body capable of. He steadied his feet so they wouldn't tumble down the steps, and gently put his hands on his sister's back while she wept into his neck. Dipper didn't cry, he didn't feel much of anything, but he supposed that his emotions were out of practice, and they would catch up to him later. 

Mabel pulled back and held his cheeks in her hands. "It's you," she murmured. "It's really you."

"It's really me," he said, and then came the delayed lump in his throat.

Something snapped in Mabel's brain, and she stood straight, wiped the tears from her eyes, and exhaled a long breath. "Okay," she said, and glanced over her shoulder at the house, as if she had forgotten it was behind her. "Okay. I suppose it's time for you to meet everybody." She grinned, eyes puffy, and stepped back inside, held open the door for him. "Come in."

Dipper took two slow strides into her home. She shut the door, shut out the brightness. There was a narrow hallway leading into a kitchen, and another room on the left that Dipper couldn't see into. White walls, dark hardwood floor. On his right, the stairs rose up to a closed door, and at the foot of the stairs was a wooden cabinet, mail stacked on top, a bowl for keys, and a framed photo of a fluffy white dog that he did not recognize. He could feel Mabel's eyes on him as he stood pressed up against the front door, as far away from the house as one could be without actually leaving it.

"Andy?" she called out. Amidst the questions compiling in his head, Dipper recalled that Mabel was married to a man called Andrew – Andrew Hollis, an actor famous for his supporting role in a sitcom Dipper had occasionally seen on the TV in prison. Mabel called out his name again.

"Yeah?" came a muffled response, from upstairs.

"Can you come down here, please?"

When the door at the top of the stairs opened, Dipper stopped aimlessly surveying the hallway. Andrew, a tall man, with shaggy blond hair, jogged down the stairs and slowed to a stop, with enough reservation in his expression to tell Dipper that Andrew knew who he was. And _what_ he was.

"Andy, this is Dipper. My brother. Dipper, this is Andy, my husband."

Andrew held out his hand. "Hi, Dipper. Good to finally meet you."

"You too," Dipper said, slightly thrown off by both the man's smile and his British accent – he couldn't recall if his character in the show was British, but Dipper also tended to leave the room whenever Andrew came on screen, lest he jog too many memories of his sister.

The interaction reached a stalemate. Both Mabel and her husband stared as if Dipper were a ghost.

Dipper thumbed the door behind him. "I can leave, if you want."

Mabel stepped forward and took one of his hands, held it between hers. "God, no, Dip. It's just– it's hard to believe you're really standing there. In our home." She looked back at Andy, and they both smiled. "We... I mean, we talk about you all the time. I can't believe this day has actually come. And so much earlier than I expected, too."

"I'm sorry I didn't call ahead. Um, my phone–"

"No, don't be silly. I'm glad you didn't call ahead." She laughed. "I don't think I'll see a better surprise for the rest of my life."

"It really is good to see you," Andrew said, leaning on the banister. "We've got a lot of catching up to do, I reckon. Why don't we all go have a seat in the living room?" He turned to Mabel and spoke quieter. "Shall I bring the girls down?"

She thought about it for a second, nodded, and suddenly she was leading Dipper by the hand, into her living room, and Andrew was jogging back up the stairs. "The girls?" Dipper murmured, slightly alarmed at the pace at which he was re-entering his sister's life. But, that was Mabel. She lived at breakneck speed. Andrew had proposed to her two weeks after they'd met, so he couldn't have been much different, either.

"My girls," she said. "My daughters." She turned and smiled up at him. "You're an uncle, Dipper."

He sunk onto a couch, and leaned back, which wasn't particularly polite, he knew, but his legs had turned to gelatin and it was either the couch or the expensive-looking vase that he had to collapse onto. Mabel hovered above him, eyes alight with concern. "Is that too much? Oh my god, of _course_ it is, I'm so sorry. I'll tell Andy to keep them upstairs–"

"No," he said, and rubbed his temples. "No, I want to see them."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course. I mean, they're _your_ kids. I'm sure I'm gonna love them right away."

Mabel gazed at him for a second, and put her hands up to her chest, like she couldn't believe he had said that. He could hardly believe it, either. It sounded _normal_. And warm. And not even intentionally so, because to him, it was as factual as declaring the sky blue.

Mabel hurried out of the room, towards the soft footfalls on the stairs. While she whispered something to her family, Dipper had a few seconds to take in his surroundings – the room was neat and clean, two couches, an armchair, widescreen TV, giant basket of toys in the corner. Then there were four pairs of eyes on him. Mabel crouched down beside her two daughters. The taller one was the spitting image of her mom, long brown hair and pink cheeks, and the shorter girl had her dad's curly blonde hair. Mabel asked them gently to say hello, but they only stared, the younger one sucking her thumb. 

"This is your uncle Dipper," she said. "Do you remember? We saw him in the pictures. On the iPad." She turned to Dipper and grinned. "They're very shy. Dipper, this is Zoey and Bianca."

Dipper lifted his hand and attempted to smile, but it was hard to hide his discomfort. The poor girls looked terrified of him. Mabel laughed it off and sat on the opposite couch with Zoey in her lap, and Andrew did the same with Bianca, and with their upright posture and neat hair and easy smiles, Dipper could have pulled out a camera and snapped the perfect family photo.

"Oh," Mabel said. "I'm sorry, did you want anything to drink? Something to eat?"

"I'm okay, thanks."

"Are you sure? We've got root beer." She nudged Andrew's arm and laughed. "All this guy ever used to drink was root beer. The dentist told you off for it once, didn't she Dip?"

He attempted a smile again. "That's right."

"Mom told her to mind her own business."

They fell into silence. Dipper tried not to choke on it.

"Have you been in the city long, Dipper?" Andrew asked.

"No, I, um– I just got in last night. I mean, I got out yesterday morning. So I thought I'd come here. It felt like... not the only thing to do, but the right thing, I guess. I'm sorry I showed up unannounced."

"No, please," Andrew said. "Don't apologize. You're welcome to stay as long as you like."

Mabel nodded enthusiastically.

"Oh," Dipper said, "well, I wasn't planning on staying. I mean, I can't just turn up out of the blue and interrupt your lives. I was going to stay in San Francisco for a while, but I can get a hotel room."

"God, you can't pay hotel prices around here. You'll be skint within a week. We've got a guest room upstairs." He turned to Mabel. "We can get that ready this afternoon, can't we?"

"Yeah," she said. "You _have_ to stay, Dipper. I won't let you leave." Her face fell. "I mean, you'd be able to leave, obviously. It wouldn't be like– _blegh_. My big mouth. The point is that you're _welcome_ to stay. And I would be very happy if you did. We would all be. The girls love you already."

Dipper lowered his eyes to the lap-bound children. They were still staring. "I'm not sure how that could be true," he said.

"It is," Mabel said. She squeezed Zoey's cheek. "If this one doesn't like somebody she throws her toys at them. She has a bit of an attitude problem."

Before he knew it, two hours had passed. Mabel told him all about her job – she was an illustrator for children's books – and Andrew told him a little about working in Hollywood. They didn't ask Dipper any silly default questions, like _what have you been up to?_ which he was grateful for. It was more realistic to assume that he hadn't existed for eight years, and to fill him in on what he had missed.

But he hadn't come here merely to chat, and when Andrew took the kids outside to play on their tricycles, and Mabel had finished telling Dipper how their cousins' lives had evolved, Dipper saw an opportunity to jump in. He scratched his head. "Listen, Mabel... I have a lot that I need to apologize for."

"Nope," she said, and jumped to her feet. "We're not going to do that right now."

"But–"

"I know we have a lot to talk about. But we're not going to talk right now because it's only 2 P.M., and I still have a lot to do today, and right now I have to make lunch for my kids and I don't want to be crying into their sandwiches." There was a steadfast, motherly look in her eyes, daring Dipper to object.

"Okay," he said. "Yeah, that's fine."

"Good. So, why don't you come in the kitchen and help me make lunch, and then after lunch we'll go out for a drive and pick up some of the things you're going to need. Starting with a working phone."

The radio in the kitchen played folk music while Mabel made cheese and cucumber sandwiches for her daughters, and passed them over to Dipper to cut off the crust. A simple task, but he couldn't focus on it. He kept glancing out the window to the backyard. The girls were gliding through Andrew's legs on a Slip 'N Slide. Dipper looked around the kitchen at the framed photos, the pinboard exhibiting the children's drawings, _FAMILY_ spelled out of magnets on the refrigerator, and he tried not to feel too out of place. He was supposed to be easing back into life in the outside world, and he couldn't work out whether the idealistic family home he found himself in would be a hindrance to that.

Lunch was a quiet affair. They all sat around the dining table and Mabel tried getting him to collaborate on a list of stores they would need to visit that afternoon, but he found it hard to talk with two beady pairs of eyes on him at all times. He thought he had moved on from the days of being watched – and yes, it was a little ridiculous to compare innocent children to prison guards, but Zoey and Bianca seemed to have the same effect on him as even the sternest warden. They made him feel unwelcome. Ostracized. 

Andrew stayed at home with the kids and tidied up the guest room, and driving with Mabel, Dipper loosened up a little. They drove out of Presidio, back into the city, and stopped first at a Target to buy him a new cell phone. Mabel hightailed it around the aisles with a shopping cart, asking what groceries he wanted, but when he only gave noncommittal answers she quietly loaded up the cart with food she knew he used to like – pizza rolls, instant ramen, root beer. A couple of beef steaks. He would have attempted to pay at the register, but he knew Mabel would have vehemently refused, and he didn't have the energy for an argument.

They went to a busy mall, which kickstarted Dipper's claustrophobia again. Every time they stepped into a store he breathed a sigh of relief, even if Mabel only looked at one price tag, snorted, and turned right around to leave. Eventually, they picked out a few t-shirts, some button-ups, jeans, chinos. A long time ago, he would have been irritated by his sister picking out clothes for him. _You're undermining my independence_ , he might have said. Now he was just happy she was here.

"I'll knit you a sweater," she said. "It's pretty mild here in the winter but you'll still need a sweater." 

He smiled, but it faltered; it was October. Surely he wouldn't still be living in his sister's guest room come winter. He thought a lot about that on the drive back to the house. The list of places he could go was still the same as on the night he planned to flee with Wendy, from her dad, all those years ago, and the more remote the place, the further up the list it sat. He didn't _need_ to hide from the general public anymore, but he wanted to. 

There was a single window in the guest room, overlooking the neighborhoods on the hills below, and the tops of skyscrapers in the background. He stood at the window for the better part of an hour, watching the sun glint on the ripples of the ocean, relishing the quiet, but at the same time drawing comfort from the sound of his nieces' voices through the floorboards. It was a perfect blend of peace and safety, like falling asleep in the Mystery Shack to the muffled sound of Stan's TV downstairs. 

They ate dinner, and Dipper joined the family in the living room afterwards to watch TV, on Mabel's invitation. And even though no-one was talking, and the girls were distracted enough by the TV that they no longer watched Dipper like hawks, he still couldn't shake the feeling that he was intruding. This room was for family, and how could he be considered family if he missed their wedding? Missed the birth of their children and every birthday after that?

At around eight o'clock Andrew took the girls up to bed. Dipper didn't quite know how to react when they both said goodnight to him, unprompted. He defaulted to smiling and waving. "I think I'll turn in as well," he said to Mabel.

She looked like she was about to ask why, but stopped herself. It was strange that he had traveled down here to escape solitude and now he was trying to escape company, but he needed company in small doses, he felt. 

"Okay," Mabel said. They both stood up, a foot apart, and Mabel laughed at the awkwardness and hugged him.

"Thank you," Dipper said. "For letting me stay. I know I've been quiet, and it probably doesn't seem like I appreciate what you're doing for me, but I do. And, you know, if there's anything I can do to repay you... I mean, I got pretty good at doing laundry, for one." 

" _You?_ You got good at doing laundry?" She grinned.

"Yeah. I know it's not much, but–"

"Dipper, don't worry about it. We just want you to... relax. Take some time to recover. You're welcome here as long as you want to stay. We _want_ you to stay. And, you know, when you're feeling better, I'm sure you'll naturally start helping us out anyway. I mean, the girls can be a handful. I cannot _wait_ to have a free babysitter."

"Yeah... I think I might need to get to a point where they're not terrified of me, first."

"What? They're not terrified of you. They said goodnight to you. I didn't even tell them to do that."

"Okay, what I really meant was that I need to get to a point where I'm not terrified of them."

"How can you be terrified of them? I mean, normally they're monsters, but ever since you turned up they've been behaving like little angels."

"I'm just not used to kids, I guess. I don't know what to... do, or say. There aren't a lot of them in prison."

She chuckled and shook her head. "I love hearing you talk like that."

"Like what?"

"Like... I don't know. Like everything's a joke. Like you don't have a clue what you're doing."

He frowned. "Thank you?"

She pushed him gently. "You know what I mean. You're funny." The smile faded from her face and something more serious took over. "God, I missed you."

The memory of her last visit flashed in his mind. How she looked over her shoulder as she left, tears smearing her makeup, and Dipper only stood up from the table and turned away. "I missed you too."

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "We still have a lot to talk about."

"Yeah. I can wait. You know, whenever you're ready."

"Okay."

He hesitated for a beat and said, "I'm really happy for you. I mean, Andrew seems great. Your daughters are beautiful."

"Okay," she said, pushing him out of the room. "That's enough of that. I am not ready to cry just yet."

He chuckled and headed for the stairs. "Night, Mabel."

"Goodnight, Dipper."


	7. Chapter 7

Dipper stared at his reflection in the kitchen window. Things were getting better – he was sleeping more, and the purple bags that had hung from his eyes since his release had faded away. He scratched his beard and made a mental note to buy a razor; he liked his beard, but Bianca reached up and plucked hairs out of it often enough that it was becoming detrimental to his health. She didn't like his nose much, either, judging by how violently she squeezed it, but there wasn't a lot he could do about that. 

Mabel drew the curtains, blocking his view. She scurried over to the cabinets and Dipper traced the pattern in the granite countertop with his finger, only distantly aware that she was talking to him.

"Dip?"

"Hmm?"

She held up a bottle of wine, two glasses dangling from her fingers. "Do you want some?"

"Oh, no. Thank you."

She popped off the cork and frowned. "When's the last time you had a drink?"

The night he punched Doug Tanner. "Before prison," he said. "Can't remember when."

"Well." She pulled out a stool opposite him and set her glass on the counter. "If we're going to talk about this, I need a drink."

Dipper nodded, his mind elsewhere. "Hey, you know what I just realized? I never asked you how old your kids are. Is that bad? I've been so preoccupied with myself, I–"

"Dipper," she said, and swatted his hand. "Chill, dude. You're fine." She took a sip of her wine. "Zoey's four. She'll be five in March. And Bianca is two and a half."

"March," Dipper murmured. "So the last time you came to see me, you were pregnant."

She nodded and smiled. "I know what you're thinking. I was so young, I wasn't old enough to raise a baby. Mr. Practical."

"I'm not thinking that," he said. "I have no doubt in my mind that you're the best mom on the planet."

Her eyes snapped up, as if sensing he was joking. But he wouldn't joke about that, and she realized it. "Something's happened to you," she said, her eyes narrowed. "I married a boy and you didn't even get to vet him. But you seem okay with that. You've lost your protectiveness."

He shrugged. "It's hard to be protective when we're so far apart."

She hummed in agreement, pulled a thin black case out of her pocket, opened it up on the counter, and rubbed a small sheet of something on her face.

"What are you doing?"

"Wiping off my makeup," she said.

"Oh. I'll try not to say anything to make you cry."

Mabel laughed. "Good luck with that. You already came pretty close, with that comment about me being the best mom on the planet."

She threw the makeup wipe away and closed the case, slipped it back into her pocket, and then she gazed across at him, waiting. He picked his thumbnail, recalling his last night in Gravity Falls. Strangely, more vivid than the event that led to his arrest was the memory of riding in the back of the cop car, and looking out the window, up at the same galaxy of stars that he used to watch with Wendy from Lookout Point.

"After it happened," he said, "I felt like I wasn't worth anybody's time. Do you remember when I was first diagnosed as bipolar? And I hid up in my room and you spent hours trying to convince me to take my meds."

"I remember you kept calling yourself a 'lost cause.' And I remember shouting at you a lot. Mostly telling you to grow some balls."

"Yeah. Well, being in prison felt like that – like I was a lost cause – but it was ten times worse. Every time one of the wardens came up to me and said I had a visitor, I was angry. I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to see me. I couldn't even comprehend it. Especially Wendy, I mean, Jesus Christ. The first time she came to see me, she sat down and she– she started talking like we were just getting coffee. She was complaining about her boss at the bowling alley."

"I can understand that," Mabel said. "She wanted you to know that she forgave you."

" _Forgave_ me? She wouldn't forgive me, Mabel. She _can't_ forgive me. I killed her dad. If you kill your girlfriend's dad, that's the absolute end of a relationship. There's no forgiveness after that. How could there be?"

"Dipper." She lowered her head. "It wasn't that simple."

"Yeah, it was. How could it not be that simple?"

"Because people still loved you. Wendy did, I did, Stan did. Love is unconditional."

"But that isn't true. It can't be unconditional, there have to be conditions. Becoming a murderer is a pretty big condition."

Mabel bit down on her lip and glanced off to the side. "Okay, I didn't realize we were going to talk about this specifically, but... Dip, there's a reason that you're here and not in prison for the rest of your life. You are not a murderer."

"I was convicted for murder."

"No, you were convicted for manslaughter. You saw something deeply disturbing and you needed to stop it. It wasn't– I'm not saying it was the best thing to do, but other people, in your position, might have done the same thing."

"That doesn't change anything, though. He was fucked up in the head." Dipper glanced around, expecting to find a child in the doorway, but he concluded that if one of them was eavesdropping, an f-bomb wouldn't have been anywhere near the most shocking part of the conversation. "Sorry. He was sick. Wendy said so. He could have been sent to prison, or a mental institution, or something. He could have gotten better."

"And maybe he never would have gotten better, and he would have lived on to make Wendy's life miserable. You can't go back and wonder what might have been different, Dipper. It'll eat you up inside."

"But you can't– you can't defend it like that. You can't defend what I did. I took a man's life, there's no defense for that."

"But there is," she said. "That's why you only served eight years."

Dipper gazed into her steady eyes. The reason he had chosen to come to San Francisco was that out of the few people in his memory, his sister was the most likely to overlook his crimes and accept him. He could almost count on it. But this was two steps beyond that – not only did she seem to forgive him for the felony, she was trying to justify it. "So you're not scared of me?" Dipper said, disbelieving. "You don't feel a little bit sick when you look at me?"

She shook her head. "You were trying to do the right thing. You just didn't do it in the right way."

Dipper opened his mouth but didn't respond. It was true, to an extent, and it was also an opinion he had held for a part of his sentence, at least subconsciously; in his untitled fantasy trilogy, Willow murdered the king and didn't once regret it. When Dipper came to reread the stories several years later, he was conflicted. If he were to take the stories to the outside world, have them published, what would he be trying to push on people? The idea that murder could be a moral solution? The books almost felt dangerous, after that. The night before he left, he stashed the notebooks under Mitch's bed. Mitch had always liked them, although – and Dipper was only now realizing this – Mitch was a killer who did not often express regret for his past.

"I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this," Mabel said.

"I guess not."

"This whole time, did you think that I– that I didn't love you anymore? Is that why you didn't want to see me?"

"No, I knew that you loved me. But I wanted you not to." His voice broke. "You're, like, the best person in the world, Mabel. You're too good for anybody."

In the blink of an eye, her face contorted and she began to weep. She bit down on her lip and shook her head.

"You are," Dipper said. "My whole life, I've fought tooth and nail, to even be _half_ of who you are. And when I was at my rock bottom, for you to still be taking time out of your day to travel to Oregon and see me, I thought you were wasting your time. And I told you that, remember?"

She nodded, wiping her eye on her sleeve, but the tears kept coming, and Dipper's own eyes started to well up.

"But you kept coming back," he said, "week after week, so I did the only thing I could think of to keep you away."

"You told me you didn't want to see me anymore," Mabel whimpered.

He told her that, contrary to what she thought, he had started a new life in prison, and he didn't want her to be a part of it. She had trembled, staring at the table, but she kept a straight face, and told him that he didn't mean that, but he insisted that he did. "And then I started refusing to see you. But it wasn't true, Mabel. None of it was true. You were the only thing getting me through the week. I just didn't want to be the only thing ruining yours."

Mabel hopped down from the stool, came around the counter, and hugged him. Suddenly he felt weak, and he dipped his head and rested his chin on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"Why would you think you were ruining my week?" she said, her voice wet. "Didn't I make it pretty clear that I wanted to see you?"

"I wanted you to have a normal life. That wasn't possible if you had to visit your criminal brother once a week."

She pulled away and wiped her eyes again. "I don't get it, Dipper. You get these skewed ideas in your head. Why would an estranged brother be any more normal for me than an imprisoned one?" He couldn't answer, and she sighed and leaned on the counter. "I guess that doesn't matter. I guess I'll never know what would run through my head if I was in prison." She put her hand on top of his. "What matters is that you came here. After the last time I drove up there, I got it in my head that I'd never see you again. I always said to Andy, 'if he comes back, we'll put him up in the guest room, right?' But I don't think I ever expected it to happen. I was just saying it to comfort myself." She chuckled, dabbing the last tears from the corners of her eyes. "And then one day you were there, on our doorstep."

Dipper swallowed the lump in his throat. Mabel had built a life here, visible in the photos and the mementos all around them, but Dipper's absence had been an underlying source of suffering for her, and to think that he had caused that filled him with guilt. That guilt swelled when he thought about Stan and Wendy; his parting words with Stan were akin to what he had later said to Mabel, except his uncle, a bitter and hardened man, had bitten back. _I feel sorry for you, kid. If you keep acting like this you'll have nobody left._ Stan was gone, now – he died in his sleep two years into Dipper's sentence. 

As for Wendy, Dipper wondered if she still thought about him. He doubted it. Even when they were together, Wendy had been an independent woman. If nothing else, her move to Denver would have helped her forget Dipper, and Gravity Falls, and the darkness that loomed over her old cabin in the woods. 

"The only people I didn't tell to leave me alone were Mom and Dad," he said. A bitter laugh slipped out. "They did that on their own."

"Yeah, well," Mabel said. "They're assholes."

"They're what?"

"Assholes. Screw them."

Dipper couldn't find anything to say.

"Last time I spoke to them must have been... four years ago? Right after Zoey was born, I think."

"Wait, I don't get it. What happened?"

"They neglected you, that's what happened."

"I mean, yeah... but they had a pretty good reason to."

"I don't just mean because they stopped visiting you. I mean because they started acting like you don't exist." She bit her lip and laced her fingers together. "Sorry, I didn't want to tell you about that, but... it was horrible, Dipper. Any time I mentioned your name they went stiff, like if I said it again you'd go _poof_ and appear in the room and ruin dinner."

Dipper thought he had emotionally detached himself from his parents a long time ago, but it still hurt to know that to them, he may as well have been dead. 

"And it wasn't just that," Mabel said. "They never took it seriously that you were bipolar. They paid for your therapy, but that was about it. I bet they were thrilled when you told them you wanted to go back to Gravity Falls."

"You can't shun them just because of me, Mabel."

"I can. I have. If anything, it's a precaution. Why would I want my family around people that disowned their son?"

Dipper felt that her logic was somewhat flawed – how could his parents have been a worse role model for Mabel's kids than he was? He didn't say anything, as much as he thought Zoey and Bianca deserved some grandparents, if only for the extra presents at Christmas and on their birthdays. But maybe they had that relationship on Andrew's side. "I'm sorry, Mabel. If I could go back ten years... I wouldn't have gone back to Gravity Falls, I guess I wouldn't have even reconnected with Wendy if I'd known how it would turn out. Things could have been so much more simple for all of us."

Mabel shrugged. "You were in love. I've done plenty of crazy things in love as well."

Dipper almost laughed at how facile that sounded. His sister was beginning to trivialize the severity of what he had done, and he wasn't sure if that was healthy or not. And at the same time, the mention of Wendy had opened up a hole in front him that he couldn't resist digging further into. "Have you heard from her at all?"

Her expression softened and she shook her head. "I haven't spoken to her in a few years, either. Last I did, she was in her final year of college, on track to graduate. She was living in Denver. But, again, this was around the time that I had Zoey, so life was kind of hectic. She never posts anything on Facebook, either. I'm sorry."

"No, don't apologize." He smiled. "I don't know what I wanted to hear, really. I guess it would be nice to know that she's doing well, settled down somewhere."

"She seemed really happy when I did speak to her. And she was gushing over Zoey's baby pictures. Which, um–" she elbowed Dipper playfully – "you have yet to look at, by the way." 

Dipper grinned and rolled his eyes. "Go get the baby pictures, then."

"What? No, I didn't mean right now. We're having a serious discussion."

"Yeah, and we're done with it. My head hurts. Go on, go get the baby photos."

Mabel stood up straight, her eyes wide, beyond excitement. "Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

She scurried out of the kitchen, paused in the doorway. "Wait, just Zoey's? Or Bianca's too?"

"All of them. All the family vacation photos, too."

Mabel beamed, and clapped her hands together loud enough to wake up her whole family, and then they all spent a couple of hours in the living room, photo albums spread out over the carpet, the girls elated to be up past ten o'clock, competing for Dipper's attention, Andrew watching them with a sleepy smile on his face, even though he'd be up at four in the morning to go to work.

And in the weeks that followed, life continued in the same vein. Andrew only worked for six months a year, and when he was working, he spent his weekdays and weeknights in L.A. This was a constant strain on their marriage, though having witnessed how mushy they could be around each other on weekends, Dipper wasn't the least bit concerned that that strain would have any real effect. Mabel talked a lot about their plan to move further south along the coast, once she could tear herself away from San Francisco. She worked from home full-time, and she mentioned to Dipper at least a hundred times a day how glad she was to have him around – she got twice the amount of work done when the kids were too busy playing games with him to distract their mom.

Zoey and Bianca had become his best friends, essentially. He made them their lunch, he took them to the park, and he was invited to all of their tea parties (except the all-girl tea parties, although every all-girl tea party thus far had undergone a reconsideration midway through, in which the majority of the stuffed animals present had voted in favor of allowing boys in again). 

He spent many a Saturday evening up late around the dining table with Mabel and Andrew, trading banter with Mabel like they hadn't missed a day and with Andrew like they'd been friends for years. On sunny afternoons, he walked down to the beach, and gradually became re-acclimated to the general public, learned to ignore his self-involved paranoia that everybody everywhere was watching him. He stood on the shore, the autumn winds cold but not unpleasant, and watched the water until it reminded him of the lake in Gravity Falls, at which point he would turn around, trek back up the hill, and find a chore to do in the house to keep his mind away from such things.

And while on the surface his adjustment to life as a free man was going well, there was something keeping him awake at night that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Though he paid little attention to the exact date, he knew it was December. He had been released on October 14. That meant he had been a part of the Hollis household for at least six weeks, which must have been well beyond what the average person would consider overstaying their welcome. He replayed in his head every conversation he had had that day, trying to pick up on subtle hints he hadn't noticed the first time round, but – save for the curious stares from the kids on the first couple of days – Mabel's family had not made him feel anything other than welcome. They never asked him where he was planning on going next, what he was planning to do. And when he had convinced himself he was only entertaining the paranoia that Mabel kept scolding him for, he fell asleep.

That Friday morning, he slipped on yesterday's clothes and stumbled down the stairs to breakfast, pausing before the kitchen doorway to rub the sleep from his eyes and put on a smile that might match the bizarre early-bird energy of his sister and his nieces. Mabel was in her bright pink robe chopping up an apple and Zoey was at the counter eating cereal. They chirped 'good morning' in unison. He could hear Bianca in the living room, shouting at cartoon characters on the TV. 

He sat down opposite Zoey and took the box of Lucky Charms. As he poured them into a bowl, he noticed Zoey had stopped chewing, and she stared at him, a drop of milk running down her chin.

Dipper grinned. "Uh oh," he said. "Did I pour too much?"

Zoey did not look amused.

"I'll buy some more when I'm at the store later, 'kay?"

"They're _supposed_ to only have that once a month," Mabel said. "As a treat."

Dipper waited until Mabel's back was turned, then winked at Zoey. "I'll buy more later," he whispered.

But Zoey folded her arms and said, "well, you ate all the Pop-Tarts and you didn't put _them_ back."

Mabel spun around, one hand on her hip. "What did you just say? Don't speak to your uncle like that."

Zoey, apparently caught off guard by her mother's sternness, burst into tears, jumped down from her stool, and ran out of the kitchen. Mabel rolled her head back and shut her eyes, flinched slightly at the muffled sound of a door slamming upstairs. Dipper watched the whole fiasco in mild shock. "She didn't– like, it's okay, she didn't offend me or anything."

"I know, but I don't want her speaking to you like that. I don't want her speaking to _anyone_ like that. She's getting a little too sassy." Mabel came over to the counter, scratched her head, and sighed. "Maybe I was being too hard on her. I'm gonna go talk to her."

Suddenly, it was obvious. Sure, nobody had outright told Dipper that his extended visit was disrupting their lives, but there had been other small moments like this that he had caused, unintentionally. A couple of weeks ago Andrew had called the landline and told the girls they would have to postpone their trip to the zoo that Saturday, because he had to stay in Los Angeles and work, and Zoey said it was fine, Dipper could take them; Dipper took them lots of places, now. Sometimes when Bianca came into the living room in the evening Mabel would fuss over her and pat her lap, but Bianca would wander right past her and climb up on Dipper instead. 

This home, and these children, were not his life. He didn't necessarily _have_ a life right now, but as a free man, as an adult of twenty-seven, it was his responsibility to go out and find one, instead of becoming a permanent add-on to someone else's. He glanced down at the colorful cereal that had caused this epiphany, and finding that the appetite he had built up overnight had vanished, he poured every morsel back into the box, and washed the bowl in the sink. He traipsed into the living room and sat on the floor next to Bianca. Some kind of Dora the Explorer knockoff was on the TV, a kid wandering through the Arctic, and Dipper's mind drifted back to Alaska, the lonely cabin on a snow-covered plain. He didn't think he wanted something that solitary anymore, and perhaps it would do him good to leave behind the busyness of the city. He needed somewhere in-between, then.

Of course, he knew exactly the place.

***

Dipper woke that Sunday morning before sunrise, and quietly packed his clothes in a trash bag. He tiptoed down the stairs in his socks and didn't switch any lights on until he reached the kitchen. He sat down at the counter and drummed a pen on a notebook, scolding himself for not outlining sooner all of the things he wanted to say. He spent fifteen minutes, then signed his name, and left it at that – he didn't have all morning. He stashed the box of Lucky Charms he had bought the night before in the pantry, and a box of Pop-Tarts in the breadbox. 

He opened the curtains in the living room and paced in circles in the dim glow from the streetlight outside, pausing to gaze at photographs or to pick up a toy the girls had left on the floor. His heartbeat was irregular – every time he heard the softest noise, he spun around to look at the doorway, expecting one of the kids to be standing there and to scream at the sight of a man wandering around in the dark. The most recent photo of them was on top of the mantelpiece, and Dipper lingered there the longest. Simply the sight of his nieces, frozen in time, birthday cake in their hands, it was enough for him to consider turning around, tearing up the note in the kitchen, going back up to bed and emptying the trash bag out into the chest of drawers. It was unbelievable, he thought, just how fond you could become of children in a matter of weeks.

But the light in the room grew brighter, and Dipper watched out the window as a pair of headlights stopped outside the house. He blinked away the tears forming in his eyes, grabbed the bag off the floor, and opened and closed the front door as softly as he could. The taxi took him back to the bus station, and at 6:30 A.M. he boarded the Greyhound to Medford, Oregon.

The bus was at a rest stop on the side of the Interstate when he got the call from his sister. He was sitting on a metal picnic bench beside a block of toilets. The sun was low in the sky, but warm on his face already. He answered his phone, said "hey," but for a moment all he could hear on the other end of the line were shallow breaths.

"Where are you?" Mabel said quietly.

Dipper glanced around – squinting in the sun – at a sprawling landscape of hills, dotted with dry shrubbery and trees. "I'm not sure," he said. "About three hours out of San Francisco."

There was another delay before she spoke. Dipper knew that there were a lot of things she wanted to say, none of them very friendly, but she was taking the time to be diplomatic. "You're on the bus?"

"It's at a stop right now. But yeah."

"How could you not say goodbye?"

"Because I knew you would have convinced me to stay."

"You're damn right I would. Dipper, why go back there, of all places?"

He had written in the note on her kitchen counter that he was headed to the Mystery Shack. "I'm not planning on sticking around," he said, truthfully. "My old stuff is still in the attic, right?"

She sighed. "Yeah, unless Ford has cleared it out. He stays at the Shack when he's in Gravity Falls, you know. He might even be there right now. And what about your parole? Surely your parole officer isn't going to like that you're leaving your family to go hang around in the town that you... you know. Where it happened."

"It's like I said, I won't stay there for long. I just need some time to pick up where I left off, I guess. Figure out what to do next. It would be hard to do that while I'm in your house because I'd just be thinking about staying there forever, lazing around, eating your food."

She tutted. "For god's sake, Dipper, it's not like you were freeloading. You've been worth your weight in gold, looking after the girls."

"That's part of the problem, though. I'm their uncle. I'm not supposed to be, like, a daily thing for them. It makes me feel like I'm stealing their attention away from Andrew. Look, you know that I love those two to death, and I'm forever in debt to you and Andrew for letting me stay, but the longer I do stay, the more I'm going to disrupt your lives. They're not my lives to disrupt. It's your family."

"That doesn't make any sense, Dipper."

"It–" he pinched his temples – "it does, in my head. I think it will make sense if you really think about it, too."

She was quiet again. "The girls are going to be downstairs any minute now. What am I supposed to tell them?"

"Tell them that I'll be back to visit very soon."

"And will you?"

The fact that she doubted him made his heart sink. "Of course I will."

"Well how am I supposed to trust that when I can't even trust you to say goodbye properly?" she said, her voice wavering.

Dipper rubbed his forehead. Here he was again, the weight of rash decisions catching up to him. "Mabel, I _promise_ you I will come back soon. I'll even tell you when – the weekend before Christmas. I'll bring presents for everyone. I'll even dress up in that fucking Santa suit Stan had in his closet. You remember that? He used to drive around the neighborhood throwing boxes onto people's lawns, but when they opened the boxes there was just a coupon for the Mystery Shack inside?"

Mabel laughed, and sniffled. "Yeah, I remember. Please don't wear that, you'll only freak the girls out. Bianca was terrified when Andy dressed up as Santa."

"I mean... she's a smart kid. Santa's creepy. An old man watching your every move for a year and then breaking into your house at the end of it? No thank you." He looked up, and noticed the short stream of elderly backpackers boarding the bus. "Hey, Mabel, I think the bus is about to move again. I'd better go."

"Okay. Call me when you get there, okay? Please."

"I will."

"I love you, Dipper."

"I love you too. Tell the kids I love them. And... Andrew, too. Not in a gay way, though."

She snorted. "Goodbye, Dipper."


	8. Chapter 8

Even in its heyday, the Mystery Shack had been a derelict building. The exterior hadn't changed – the roof had accumulated more moss, perhaps – but the fact that it had been sitting in the quietest corner of town, untouched for years, gave it a haunting quality. The dirt parking lot had been largely reclaimed by grass, tickling Dipper's ankles, and he walked up the creaky steps of the porch and set his trash bag down on the weathered wooden planks. He rapped on the door, waited a minute, then plucked his old key out of his wallet. It slid into the lock with ease.

The sun was setting, angled perfectly to beam through the windows in the entryway and highlight every speck of dust he was disturbing. "Hello?" he called out. "Uncle Ford?"

Truthfully, Dipper was glad that he heard no reply, no movement. He didn't know what he would say to his uncle – it would be an awkward dance around the topic of murder, he supposed, and then another awkward few days of bumping into each other in the kitchen.

The living room looked exactly the same. He swept his hand over the table at the far end of the room, leaving a streak in the dust. It was like walking onto an abandoned TV set, the furniture all part of a world he could never re-enter, even by physically being there. The characters weren't around to complete it. 

He climbed the stairs to the attic and, after some hesitation, opened the door to his old bedroom. With the sunlight pouring in through the single window, the room looked so much like it did on those lazy summer afternoons that he could see himself on the bed, Wendy curled up at his side.

It was all here. Undisturbed. There was dust on every surface and cobwebs in every corner but it was all still here. The unmade bed, a bundle of clothes at the foot of it. The chest of drawers and the stereo on top, his CD collection and the band posters lining the wall. In his nightstand, his old leather-bound notebooks, the one at the bottom crumpled from the day he left it out in the rain. A bottle of lithium tablets. And in his wardrobe, hanging among the few shirts he had bothered to hang up, was one of her red flannels and a pair of jeans. He resisted the temptation to lean in and smell them, because he wasn't going to do that. He wasn't going to deliberately fill his mind with destructive thoughts of what could have been, a long, long time ago.

That day, after calling his sister, he cleaned more than he had ever cleaned in his life – vacuumed, dusted, changed the bedsheets, emptied the laundry basket. He could have slept downstairs on the couch, but he didn't know where in the house Stan had died – if it _was_ the couch, he preferred to sleep in his old room, even if a violent monster once slept here. When the sun had gone down, Dipper roamed the house, searching Stan's office in particular for a note he might have left, a journal, a letter never sent, anything that may have hinted that in his last few years he didn't harbor resentment for Dipper over their final conversation. But he found nothing, and he went to bed, the guilt keeping him up until the exhaustion from traveling took over.

***

On New Year's Day, he stepped out on the snow-dusted porch in his t-shirt and his boxer shorts and sipped his coffee while gazing off into the trees, as he did every morning. Usually, it was the only fresh air he got all day, apart from on Saturdays when he walked to the store to stock up on food.

Today, though, he decided to make a change. He showered, got dressed, put on the old pair of boots in the bottom of his wardrobe and trudged through the snow to Greasy's diner for breakfast. It was warm there, much warmer than the Shack – the heating system was on the brink and he hadn't called anybody to come and fix it. He sat in a booth and dumped his coat and sweater in a bundle on the seat next to him. After a minute of hiding behind the menu, he glanced up to survey the other patrons. A middle-aged couple at the other end of the diner averted their eyes; Dipper didn't know if they had recognized him – in a town where nothing ever happened, an enormous news story eight years ago was still pretty big today – or if they were merely curious as to who had walked into their small-town breakfast spot. The owner, Lazy Susan, was still here, had been since the first time he had stepped foot in the diner sixteen years ago, and she recognized him. It was evident in the pause after _good morning,_ when she looked up from her notepad.

Regardless, breakfast was uneventful enough that he felt comfortable making it a daily occurrence. He would stuff himself full and mosey on home, eat lunch at around three, and head out into the woods for a walk. The only words he spoke all day were to order food at the diner, except for the odd occasion that Mabel called him to check how he was doing. And he was doing okay, he thought – a little sheltered, but he had always been a hermit to some degree. He spent a lot of his time rewriting his untitled fantasy trilogy, changing up major elements of the original storyline, partly by choice, partly because he couldn't remember massive chunks of the story that now resided under a prison bunk – if Mitch hadn't already torn up the pages and used them as toilet paper, at least. 

One morning, Lazy Susan came over to his table and he pushed his empty coffee cup aside, thinking she would take it, but instead she sat down opposite him in the booth. She folded her wrinkly hands on the table, one eye closed as always, appearing to struggle with what to say.

"I can leave if you want me to," Dipper said, his voice low. He hated to think that he had upset her other customers by being here.

"Oh, no, dear, I'm not going to kick you out. I just have something to say and I'm trying to think how best to say it."

Dipper waited. He folded up his newspaper and pushed it to the far end of the table, out of the way. "Seriously, I can leave if I'm making people uncomfortable. It's no problem."

She chuckled. "No, nobody has complained, if that's what you're thinking. Though I'm sure you must feel it. The staring. The quiet when you walk in a room."

His voice dropped to a near-whisper. "Yeah, sometimes."

"Most people in this town don't know how to mind their own business, and neither do I, which is why I'm sittin' here now. But you can relax. I'm not out to getcha, or anything." She fiddled with a ring on her finger. "My parents died when I was very young," she said. "I had an uncle, Uncle Frank, who took custody of me and my older sister, Betsy, God rest her soul. He had a tiny house in Charleston, Maine, and me and Betsy had to share a bedroom, which we didn't mind, we were the best of friends. She was eleven and I was... six, I think. Anyway, for a while it wasn't so bad, we cried over our parents a lot in the night. Most nights I'd end up in her bed because one of us or the other needed comforting. We went to school, and Uncle Frank worked at the Mobil gas station two blocks over. He used to come home stinking of gasoline, but he took care of us well, always cooked us a healthy dinner."

She paused, and Dipper glanced down at the ring. She was twisting it around her finger mechanically, over and over. "Then one night," she said, "he came into our bedroom. I was awake, but he went over to Betsy's bed and woke her up. He started to... touch her. Afterwards he came over and did the same thing to me, and we were both silent. I don't think either of us knew what was happening. He started doing it every night, we started to cry and scream, but he never stopped. We were being abused, of course, but we didn't know that that was the word to describe it.

"Anyway, one night we were eating dinner, steak and mashed potatoes. It was silent at the table – Betsy and I didn't talk much anymore – and Frank, he starts coughing. He coughs once and we ignore it, but then he keeps coughing and we look up. He reached for his glass of water and drank the whole thing, and then he isn't coughing anymore, he has his hands around his throat, and his face is going red. Veins on his neck poking out. I looked over at Betsy, because I didn't know what to do, and she looked a little shocked at first, but then her face hardened. She just kept watching him, so so did I. Now Betsy, she was eleven years old, she knew what to do to save a man from choking. She knew, at least, that as soon as he hit the floor we should have called an ambulance. But when it fell silent again we just stared across the table at one another, I remember it so _vividly._ She jumped down from her chair and gave me a hug, then she stooped down and put two fingers on Uncle Frank's neck. She waited about five minutes, then she called the ambulance. He was already dead, of course."

Dipper's mouth had gone dry; he reached for the coffee cup but it was empty, and he didn't think to ask for a glass of water, because Susan was gazing in his eyes, her expression unwavering. 

She said, "Dipper, there are people in this world who don't deserve to breathe the same air as the rest of us. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

He swallowed, the dryness almost painful in his throat, and nodded slowly, transfixed. 

"Far as I'm concerned, it was a favor to all of us, what you did." With that, she got up from the booth and went to the next table over, before Dipper had a chance to thank her, or to respond in any way whatsoever. Dipper listened as Susan greeted the new customers with a cheerful lilt in her voice, but then he filtered out their exchange, turned to gaze out the window, letting Susan's story truly sink in. 

He left behind on the table more than enough cash to cover the check, and walked back to the Mystery Shack. Upstairs in his nightstand, one of the notebooks contained a rewrite of Book One, in which Willow _spared_ the king instead of killing him, after storming his castle. Dipper withdrew the notebook from the drawer, went outside, and walked all the way through the woods to the lake, where he tossed the book into the water.

***

He felt a lot safer in the diner, after Susan's confession. It was not uncommon, when he sat in his booth at the far end of the restaurant, for his mind to conjure up an image of the townspeople swarming in and dragging him over to Main Street, to have him hanged for killing one of their own. It was certainly a fear that had stemmed from reading one too many fantasy novels in prison, but it was nice to think that if such a thing did happen, Lazy Susan would have intervened in his defense.

As the days went by, and the people that frequented the diner were not hostile towards him but polite, and friendly, he began to feel less like he was playing with fire by returning to the town he was once infamous in. He was still unsure whether anybody recognized him, though he had a feeling nobody did. He didn't think so many people could be so indifferent in the presence of a murderer, and it was even more unlikely that they were all hiding quiet respect for him, as Susan was. Maybe one day they would find out, and begin to avoid him, but for now, he was happy to peacefully exist in the small community of misfits that was Gravity Falls.

Then one day, the little golden bell above the door chimed, and by force of habit, Dipper looked up, and it was her. She stepped up to the counter, a lazy smile on her face, and said something to Susan, but Susan leaned in, concern in her eyes, and whispered something back. Wendy Corduroy turned her head and looked directly at him. 

He fixed his attention on the road outside. A nerve below his left eye was twitching, his fingers were trembling, and he thought he might have to run to the bathroom and be sick, but moving was not physically possible. He was waiting for the piercing scream that would surely come, or at least heavy footfalls of her boots as she fled the diner, but he heard neither of those things. Instead, after ten agonizing seconds, she was standing beside the table, speaking.

"Is anyone sitting here?" she asked. Her hair was the same vibrant red, but shorter – it hung just below her shoulders instead of halfway down her back. It was tucked behind her right ear, which had a feather earring in its lobe and two rings further up. She was wearing a black blouse with pink and red and yellow flowers, puffy sleeves, and light blue jeans. She still wore that easy smile; she had always been patient with Dipper and his tendency to lock up whenever he was asked the simplest of questions. 

Recalling that he was not in fact frozen in time, Dipper cast his eyes down at his newspaper, and shook his head. He did not look up as she slipped into the booth on the opposite side and sat down, an unfamiliar hint of perfume drifting across the table. Dipper read the same word on the page twenty times over – _speculating_. Was that a word? It sure didn't look like a word.

"Somebody told me they saw you over at Trader Joe's. I told them they must have been mistaken because you wouldn't be out for another few years. Looks like I was wrong."

He looked up for long enough to notice the thin layer of mascara on her lashes, but decided he would not hold eye contact for too long, otherwise he would fall in love with her all over again. "Good behavior," he mumbled.

"I'm a little offended you haven't stopped by to see me," she said, a playful smirk on her lips.

"I didn't know you were here," Dipper said. "I thought you were in Denver."

"I know, I'm teasing. No, I moved back here right after I graduated. About three years ago."

Dipper wanted to ask what she had studied, but thought it best to let Wendy steer the conversation, though he could never have anticipated the civil tone it seemed to have taken. It was sort of like breaking into somebody's house and the homeowner offering you a cup of tea.

"How long have you been here?" she asked.

"A month."

"Are you staying at the Shack?"

"Yeah."

"I'm really sorry about Stan."

Her head was cocked to the side, her eyebrows arched. She _was_ sorry. Which meant that she cared, about him, and any iota of care that she gave him was too much. Dipper scratched the back of his neck and grabbed his coat. "I'm sorry, I can't do this."

She didn't protest, and Dipper pushed open the door and made it halfway across the parking lot before he stopped in his tracks. He had forgotten to pay. He cursed up at the cloudy sky, spun around, and charged back towards the diner, but the bell rung above the door and Wendy was standing there, in his way.

"I forgot to pay," he said.

"I paid for you."

"Why?"

She clucked her tongue. "I don't want you to go back to jail right away? You just got here."

Utterly speechless, Dipper stayed in the weird standoff until he noticed the diner's customers turning in their seats, disgruntled that the pleasant warmth the diner had to offer was escaping through the wide-open door. Again, Dipper swiveled on his heels, and walked over to the road, but he heard steps in the gravel behind him.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Home."

"Can I come?"

He stopped in the grass by the side of the road and turned to look at her, trailing along behind him like a curious child. He noticed that she didn't have a coat, and the blouse was thin, but she didn't seem to care. "Aren't you cold?"

"Don't deflect the question."

"Wendy, why on earth would you want to come home with me?"

She glowered at him. "I don't know, because I haven't seen you in fucking ages?"

"It's not like I went away to summer camp, Wendy, I..."

"You what? Killed my dad? Yeah, I remember." She took a step forward, her green eyes boring into him. "But what did you want me to do? Did you want me to turn around and walk right out of the diner? Just ignore that you were sitting there?"

"Yes! Yes, exactly that. And I would have gone home, and packed up my bags, and gotten the fuck out of town before– before _this_ had a chance to happen." He started walking again, hands stuffed in his pockets, and she continued to follow him.

"Is that what you're doing right now?" she said.

"Yep."

"You would have left before you had a chance to talk to me? You would have left knowing we'd probably never see each other again?"

"That's right."

"So our friendship meant nothing to you, then? Our _relationship_ meant nothing to you."

"It doesn't matter how much it meant to me! It's a part of history, now, it's something we could never go back to."

For a couple hundred paces, she didn't say anything. She was still behind him; he could hear the occasional snap of a twig or a bush rustling as she brushed past it. He turned onto the winding dirt road leading up to the Shack, his eye still twitching periodically, his head beginning to hurt. In his mind, he was sifting through things he could say to make her turn around and leave – one final punch to her gut, and she would know, once and for all, that Dipper Pines was not worth a minute of her time. Except at the same time, he wanted her to keep following him, of course he did, because she was Wendy Corduroy, the most captivating woman on the planet. The fact that she had visibly changed only supplemented his interest. Why the haircut? The makeup, the perfume? The blouse? What had happened in the eight years he had missed?

"Aren't there things you want to say to me?" she said, just behind his shoulder, now. "Didn't you think about me at all while you were gone?"

He thought back to his prison bed, scribbling in his notebook – _Willow said, Willow asked, Willow yelled,_ Wendy's imagein his mind with every line that he wrote. There was a chink in his armor. His face fell, and he had to channel his energy to fight away the urge to break down sobbing. "Every day," he croaked. "But this isn't about what I want, it's about what _you need_. And like I told you before, you need a life that does not involve me whatsoever."

"Yeah, there you go again, thinking you know what I needbetter than I do."

Dipper stopped at the front door, the keys hanging on his finger. Wendy had walked up to the bottom step of the porch but not come any further. "Okay, so maybe it isn't about you, either. Maybe it's just common sense. We both remind each other of something awful that happened, something we would rather forget. Right?"

"Yes, but–"

"So then we shouldn't even be talking."

"Things are more complicated than that, Dipper."

"Everyone keeps saying that! I don't see how they can be."

She put her hands in her pockets, thumbs jutting out, and shrugged. "If you let me inside, maybe you'll find out."

Dipper was incredulous. It reminded him of the fall he had first moved here, the days spent following one another around town, talking on their doorsteps, flirting, neither of them confident enough to make a move on the other. The fact that she could still behave like that baffled him. He sighed, and held open the door for her. He would listen to whatever she had to say while packing his suitcase. Besides, if he didn't let her in, she would only climb up on the roof and come in through the hatch, like she used to when she wanted to scare him.

Wendy grinned and hurried up the steps. Dipper followed her into the living room but stayed a few feet away. "Man," Wendy said, turning in circles, regarding the furniture, the peeling wallpaper. "So many memories."

"Yeah."

She wandered over to the table at the far end of the room. Its entire surface was a collage of US states, aerial photos of specific towns, Post-it notes and sheets of paper attached to each one – pros and cons lists. "What's this?" she asked.

"Places I might move to," he said. 

She chuckled and shook her head. "Such a Dipper thing to do."

He walked over and joined her, gazed down at the month of work spread out before him. It had outgrown the table; some of the paper draped over the edge.

"Aww," Wendy said. She pointed to a photo of Mabel and her family, which was the only thing sitting in the _pros_ column for California. Wendy leaned forward, inspecting the photo. "Oh, she has _two_ girls now? They're _adorable._ Have you spoken to her?"

"Yeah," he said. "I went to see her as soon as I was released."

"How is she?"

"She's doing good." He smiled to himself. "It was kinda crazy, seeing her living the life she always dreamed about. She always said she was going to have two daughters and a son. I guess the son is next."

"And you know her husband's on TV, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, he's really cool, too."

They stood in silence for a moment. Dipper became aware that it was equally possible that Wendy's life had progressed as far as Mabel's had, and that she had a family of her own. And while that was what Dipper had wanted for her since his incarceration, he knew at the same time that it would stab him in the heart, because once upon a time, _he_ could have been her family.

"So what's the verdict?" Wendy said. "Where are you moving to?"

"I don't know yet."

"How long are you going to stay here?"

"That shouldn't be any of your concern."

Wendy set her jaw. "Why not?"

"I already told you why." He turned away, wandered over to the stairs, thinking he might just pack his bags in front of her to drive his point home, but Wendy was on his heels.

"Right, because now that you're here I'm supposed to avoid you like the fucking plague. Why did you even come back here if you didn't want me to see you?"

"I didn't know you would be here. I thought you were still in Denver."

"Yeah, bullshit. Out of all the places in the world you could have gone to, and–" she gestured to the table – "you've clearly thought about a lot of them, I was most likely to be right here, and you knew that."

"Are you saying I came here looking for you?"

She folded her arms. "Yeah."

"Even though I've spent the last half hour trying to get you to leave me alone?"

"Yep. You wanted to see me, then something clicked in your head when you finally did, and now you're acting like– like this."

It wasn't implausible. Gravity Falls was supposed to be a temporary stop – his initial plan was to gather up his old belongings and go live in a motel further north until he had decided on a proper destination to begin a new life. But he had become idle, as he often did, and lingered here for too long. Had he – subconsciously – been waiting for her to appear? "That's ridiculous," he said, but the more he thought about it, the more she seemed right. Even as she pinched the bridge of her nose, and scowled up at him, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. It was very possible that, eight years later, he was still blindly addicted to her, and that addiction had evidently led to some selfish decisions in the past.

Which, he remembered, was the exact reason he was trying to put distance between them. Dipper jogged up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom. 

"Where are you going?" Wendy called up to him, and as he was tearing clothes out of his wardrobe and slinging them on the bed, she appeared in the doorway. "Dipper–"

"No, you're right," he said. "You are right. I came back here because I wanted to see you, because I've always been in love with you and that clearly isn't ever going to go away. So _I_ need to go away."

"Well, there you go! That was my point. You said that– that we both remind each other of something horrible that happened, and that's true. You're always going to remind me of that night. But there's _so much more_ than that when I look at you, Dipper. I remember when we used to be friends, watching terrible movies in my room, I remember hanging out with you at the pool, I remember sitting on the roof in the dark, holding hands, I remember sleeping in your bed, and the way you held me, and– and kissing you... all of it. All the happy things." She swallowed, her eyes searching his. "I've been with two other guys since then, and they didn't... they never took my mind off you. They never understood me like you did. They were never patient with me, like you were. I mean, I treated you like shit, I– I hit you in the face, and all you cared about was whether I was okay. I've always been in love with _you,_ Dipper. I still am."

Dipper shook his head, his vision obscured by tears. "I ruined your life," he said.

Wendy's voice became a whimper. "Is that what you thought, this whole time? _He_ ruined my life, Dipper. _You_ saved it."

He turned away, towards the window. "No, don't do that. You can't justify it like that."

"Listen to me," she said, grabbing his arm and spinning him around. "Most of the time I was afraid of being in my own house. When he came into my room, a lot of the time I was too paralyzed to do anything. And when I was lying there, and he was– when it was _happening_ , I wanted to die. I don't know how many more times it could have happened before I started to hurt myself, and maybe I would have hurt myself enough to– to..." She brought her hands to her eyes and frantically wiped away tears. "You have no idea what it was like, Dipper, it was like having the life drained out of me. He was draining life out of me and you were the one thing giving it back. After he was gone, after the funeral, I came home and I sat down on my bed, and I could breathe easily again. Things were pretty rough for the first month, I was conflicted, but my brothers found out what had been happening and they were so supportive to me. I'm closer with all of them now than I ever was before."

Dipper sat down on the bed, buried his head in his hands. That night, the thought that had impelled him to slam his foot on the accelerator was that he would be making the world a safer place, making Wendy's home a safer place. But that thought had been a product of a crazed, dangerous mind, a worm in his brain that had spawned from hatred and rage. To hear Wendy justify her father's death out loud made Dipper's head spin; he hoped that she was merely lying to make him feel better.

Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw Wendy crouch down in front of him. "I don't resent you for what you did," she said. "I never hated you, or blamed you."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "If I'm capable of killing someone then I'm not in control of my own body. And that means it's only a matter of time before I hurt you."

"You won't hurt me," she said softly.

"How can you know that?"

"Because all you've ever wanted to do is protect me."

And now he was trying to protect her from himself. But her green eyes were gazing up at him, brimming with as much love as they ever had before, and it was enough to make him give up. Exhausted, he let his head fall and rest on her shoulder, squeezed his eyes shut, his hands limp in his lap. She lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, and pressed their heads together. Her hair tickled his chin.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up, facing the wall of the attic. He sat up, fast – a habit that hadn't subsided since the day he had woken up to find his notebooks had been stolen from his cell. His heart lurched in his chest – Wendy had been here, just a moment ago, but in the haze of sleep he could not determine if he'd dreamed it, until he plucked a lock of long red hair off his shirt.

It was darker outside, he thought. He got out of bed and looked out the window, but the other side of it was too dirty to see through properly. When he was halfway down the stairs, he could hear muted voices from the living room – the television. He rounded the corner and found Wendy lying on the couch, asleep, a blanket draped over her. It was the blue patchwork blanket that they used to cuddle up under. He still didn't know what time it was, but there wasn't a lot of daylight creeping into the living room, the old TV screen bright by comparison.

As if sensing him there, she stirred and sat up.

"You're still here," Dipper said.

She hugged her knees, a hint of a smirk playing on her lips. "You fell asleep on my shoulder. Thought I'd put you to bed instead of waking you up."

Dipper wandered into the room and sat on the other end of the couch. He gazed at the TV, not really watching it, and periodically he noticed Wendy glance over at him, much like Mabel had done in the first couple weeks of his return. He didn't really understand why. 

An hour must have passed. Neither of them moved, other than to reposition their legs. A warm, nostalgic feeling washed over Dipper; he had not felt so relaxed in the company of others since before prison. For the first time since sitting down, he looked over at Wendy, expecting to find her sleeping, but her eyes flicked to his.

"I was going to make chili for dinner," he said. "Do you want some?"

She nodded, and smiled, so he spent an hour in the kitchen cooking, and when it was finished he took two plates back out to the living room and passed one to her. They ate without talking, a seemingly endless marathon of _Family Feud_ reruns playing on the TV. She didn't ask him how he learned to cook, which was good, because he couldn't cook, really. He could recreate chili con carne following the very precise instructions that Andrew had written down for him.

A while after they'd finished eating, empty plates set down on the floor, Dipper said, "this guy's a dick."

It made Wendy jump. He hadn't meant to say anything out loud, but he was so relaxed that he had virtually traveled back in time to when they used to laze around, providing mindless commentary over the TV. 

"Who, Steve Harvey?" Wendy said.

"Yeah, he's an asshole. They set the questions up so it's impossible _not_ to give a dirty answer, then he gets all outraged because that woman said 'penis' on television. There's literally no other answer to that question."

"I mean... I can think of a few."

"You can think of a few 'meat products that are shaped like a cylinder?' Go ahead, I'd love to hear them."

"Okay, sausages, salami–"

"Salami is a sausage."

"No it's not, it's salami."

Dipper frowned. "Salami is a type of sausage. How do you not know that?"

"Okay, whatever, salami doesn't count, then. There are others. Um..."

"Don't look at the TV, you'll steal their answers."

"It's a commercial break!"

"Well, still, don't look! There might be a commercial for... meat, or something."

She grinned and narrowed her eyes in thought. "Okay, yeah, you're right. I cannot think of any cylindrical meats other than sausages."

"And penis."

"I would _not_ have thought of penis as an answer."

"Yes you would. That was the only thing I could think of."

Wendy laughed. "You think about penises a lot, then?"

"Yeah, okay, very funny. I worded that poorly."

They both smiled, their argument from hours before receding to the back of Dipper's mind. It was a testament to their chemistry, he supposed, that they could so quickly transform eight years of distance back into their old, relaxed routine.

_Maybe it doesn't matter_ , Dipper thought. Maybe it didn't matter how much he disagreed with Wendy, and with Mabel. Maybe it didn't matter how much he hated himself, sometimes, when he walked along the dirt road from the Shack towards the diner, replaying scenes in his head of his car careening around the corners, on his way to the Corduroy cabin on that fateful evening. Maybe all that mattered was that she was here, sharing a couch with him. She was here and she had stayed here, all day. She wanted to start again.

A fresh start. Was he really going to deny both of them that, when he didn't have much else to live for?

***

It was a cold, sunny afternoon that he next saw her. He walked along Main Street, one of the many parts of town he had not re-explored since his return. The bowling alley was now a movie theater; the shop that he had once bought Wendy flowers from was closed, the windows boarded up; and a multi-story glass building with blackout windows loomed over the church, as out of place as a building could possibly be.

Corduroy's General Storesat halfway along the street between the bank and a sandwich shop. The name had been painted along the top of the storefront, and behind the display window was a row of wooden statuettes in various sizes – women and children in old-time clothes, an owl, a gnome. Lots of cats. The most impressive was an intricate model of the Eiffel Tower, the crisscross pattern of its metalwork meticulously carved out of wood. Dipper walked to the door and peered in through the glass; there was a counter in the back corner of the shop, and Wendy was sitting behind it, fur boots up on the desk. She was solving a crossword, the end of a pencil between her teeth. He smiled to himself and pushed open the door.

Wendy looked up as the door creaked closed, and her face flashed with wonder as if Jesus himself had just walked in. "Hey," she said, standing, slinging the crossword book across the desk.

"Hey."

"You came."

"Of course," Dipper said. "I had to see for myself how the Corduroy General Store has accrued four and a half stars on Yelp."

She smiled, her hands clasped together, shy as a kid on the first day of school. "Okay, well, feel free to look around. I'll be over here if you need anything." She sat down in her chair again.

The walls were lined with generic souvenirs, reminiscent of the gift shop he spent many a day tending to up at the Mystery Shack – t-shirts, postcards, calendars, sporting designs specific to Oregon or Gravity Falls itself. Another wall was a shelf stacked with candy bars and a refrigerator full of soda. But the focal point of the store was the display in the center, several three-story shelves clustered together, holding what must have been hundreds of the wooden figurines like the ones in the window. Some were painted, but most were simply smooth, dark wood. Animals made up most of the collection – foxes, birds, dolphins, chickens, ducks, goats – but there were larger, more complex designs too, with no apparent running theme; a tree and a treehouse, two mountains with a rope bridge between, a dragon in flight. Dipper's eyes lingered on a carving of a young boy wearing a cap, a book tucked under his arm. He smiled and picked it up in his palm. He _had_ to buy that, he decided. It looked just like him.

Then he noticed the subtle shape of a palm tree carved into the hat, and the tiny handprint on the cover of the book. His mouth dropped open. That _was_ him! "Wait, wait, wait," he said, spinning around and inspecting the sculptures facing the window. "Did you _make_ all of these?"

"Yeah," Wendy said, from the corner. "I thought I told you that?"

"You told me you sold wooden sculptures, not that you made them." Suddenly it made sense why she seemed nervous. She was opening up her creative world to someone whose opinion clearly mattered to her. "Wendy, I don't even know what to say. These are incredible." He wandered over to her and leaned on the counter, still entranced by his younger self. "This is exactly what I used to look like."

She chuckled. "I know, I remember."

"How much?"

"What? Oh, you can have it for free. It wouldn't exist if not for you, right?"

"I want to pay for it. How much?"

"For those ones... I'd usually charge ten bucks."

He fished out his wallet and handed her a ten. "When did you start making these?"

She closed the cash register and shrugged. "Pretty much as soon as I moved back here. Marcus was still living in the cabin and we had a bunch of logs in the backyard that he'd never moved. I went out there one day and sat down on the tree stump, just started whittling. The first one I ever made loosely resembled a fish. It was terrible. I burned it."

Dipper grinned. "That sounds like something you would do."

"Yeah. I got better at it though, and then one day I was sitting in the diner, carving a little cat standing up on its back legs. Lazy Susan was _fascinated_ by it. When it was finished she bought it from me."

"Lazy Susan was your first customer?"

"Lazy Susan was my first customer." She smiled. "In fact, she was the one who convinced me I could make a business out of them. I might not have this place if it wasn't for her."

"That's awesome." He glanced around again at the merchandise, all so neatly arranged, so aesthetically pleasing. Wendy wasn't a neat freak – she probably never could have dated Dipper if she was – but she clearly took pride in the store. "Do you love it here?"

"I do. I mean, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but the store doesn't turn a profit. My money from selling the cabin is, like, slowly getting drained out of my bank account. But I make enough that I could stay here for another ten years if I wanted to." Wendy had sold the Corduroy cabin with her brothers two years back, splitting the money four ways. Straight after, she began renting this building, and lived in the apartment upstairs. Another family entirely now lived in the secluded spot; Dipper wondered if they were aware of what had happened in the driveway. "Anyway, the sculptures make more money than anything else in here and that's enough reason to keep making them. I actually get a lot of customers that used to go to the Mystery Shack. A lot of people miss it."

"Maybe I could help out," Dipper said, without really thinking about it. "I mean, if you want me to. I have a lot of experience running crappy little gift shops."

Wendy frowned.

"Not crappy. God, no– I meant the Mystery Shack was crappy. This place is great. It's beautiful."

She cocked her head to the side and laughed. "And what services could you lend to my crappy gift shop?"

"I could... do some marketing. Try to get you some exposure. Do you have a website?"

She shook her head.

"Right, okay, that's one thing that ought to change. We're not in the seventies anymore. You could use a Facebook page, too. Most businesses have them these days."

"You don't even use Facebook."

"That's because I have no friends. That doesn't mean Corduroy's General Store can't have friends."

"You have friends," she said quietly.

"Like who?"

"Um, there's one standing in front of you?"

"Ah." He pointed at her. "We're not friends, we're business partners."

A grin crept up on her face.

"But seriously, you can tell me to hit the road if you want."

"No," she said. "I would love to work with you."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"Cool. And I'm not– I'm not talking about taking your money, or anything. I just want to help out."

She frowned again. "What, for free?"

"It wouldn't really be for free. You'd be giving me a sense of purpose again."

She smiled, and turned to open the door behind her. "Come on," she said. "If you like my crappy gift shop, you'll love my crappy apartment."

***

They saw each other every day, after that. Dipper made a website for the store, which saw no traffic at all until he created the Facebook page, and gradually the townsfolk started to leave comments – always positive. Mabel went nuts and directed an army of her seven-hundred Facebook friends to 'like' the page, and the fifty-or-so Californians that _did_ do that helped the page gain exposure across the whole country, even though most of the people supporting it probably had no intention of traveling interstate to visit the store. He regularly uploaded pictures of Wendy's sculptures, and they garnered a lot of attention – again, that was mostly people around the world simply admiring the craftsmanship, and he didn't think it would lead to an increase in sales. He kept doing it because whenever he showed Wendy one of the posts, she sat in silence with a huge smile on her face, reading and rereading the comments on his laptop.

He printed a stack of flyers and left some in the information center on the outskirts of town, others on the counter of Greasy's diner. Wendy always asked customers how they had heard about the store, and the answer was always that they had stumbled upon it walking down the street or that a friend had referred them. If Dipper happened to be in the shop at the time, Wendy would look over and shrug, sympathetic. _Maybe next time_ , her smile said. He expected they would get to the end of the month and his work would not have gained them any new customers, but it didn't seem to matter to Wendy. Her face lit up whenever he walked in, and became even brighter when he brought her lunch, even though he only had to walk next door to get it. Dipper remembered what Wendy's dad had once told him, a truth among lies – _she's always had trouble fitting in._ It was possible that on the many occasions Dipper had sat at the top of the bleachers, looking out on the bay, Wendy had been sat behind the counter in her store, alone.

Dipper thought about it a lot. Why did he keep coming back every day, and why was she always so happy to see him? It was a pattern they had lived in for an eternity; before the shop, he had visited the bowling alley; before the bowling alley, he had wandered through the woods to her cabin. Were they simply two lonely people craving company, or was there an unbreakable connection between them?

It was the latter, he thought. They were in love – they had confessed as much to one another the day she had found him in the diner. But since the moment he had fallen asleep on her shoulder, they had not touched, save for the occasional mistake, like reaching for a door handle at the same time. That felt normal to him, though. Responsible. The unclear status of their relationship would once have irked him to no end, but now, he didn't mind. He considered himself lucky to be in the same room as her, and the dreamlike state that had come over him since her return to his life overshadowed everything. 

That didn't mean that his mind was at peace. Some nights, when sleep refused to come, he traipsed downstairs and sat at the table in the living room, poring over his map of new beginnings. He had not added to it at all, but he did glance at certain towns and entertain the idea of moving there. 

Driving away from Gravity Falls, away from her, again, would crush both of them. He knew that. Since his first day as a prisoner, Dipper had taken his medication every morning, he had never lost his temper, he had not once felt the slightest gravitation toward violence, and yet, he saw himself as a time bomb. It was difficult not to. Would he hurt her more if he left, or would he hurt her more if he stayed? 

On a Sunday in early March, they took a walk around the lake and retired to the Shack to watch TV. Dipper fell asleep on the couch and woke up in the dark, _Separate Ways_ – Andrew's sitcom – playing at a low volume. The light from the television guided him out of the room; he flicked on the light in the hall, then the kitchen. The clock on the microwave read eight-thirty P.M. Wendy must have left and not woken him up. Dipper turned off the TV and the lights downstairs, traipsed up to his bedroom, but stopped halfway up the stairs. He could hear a repetitive, dull thump coming from the roof. He thought it must be some kind of animal, at first, but as he climbed the ladder up to the roof he realized what he was going to see. He pushed up on the hatch, and Wendy – sitting with her legs dangling off the ledge – turned and smiled at him. "Hey," she said.

Dipper shut the hatch behind him and sat beside her. Above the immeasurable sprawl of pine trees, the sky was clear, the stars bright. It was warm enough to sit outside without jackets, and all around them, the woods were silent. Wendy started to swing her legs, the heel of her boots tapping against the roof.

"Do you think," she said, "that in sixteen years' time, we'll still come up here?" 

"Why sixteen years?" He wasn't even thinking ahead sixteen minutes.

"Because sixteen years ago was when I first showed you this spot."

He widened his eyes. "Jesus Christ."

"Yeah, right?" She was quiet for a moment, then sighed. "I don't know what it is about this place. This town. I mean, it's hardly exciting. I can't see any lights, it's like everybody's gone to bed already. But man, I love it. My apartment in Denver was on a really busy street, there'd be cars driving back and forth all night long. It was kinda cool, like, being in the middle of everything. But I was meant for a quiet life, I think."

Dipper smiled to himself. "Yeah, me too." Something popped into his mind that he had been contemplating for a while. "It's good to get away every now and again, though, right?"

Wendy stopped kicking her legs, and frowned at him. He supposed that, with his history of disappearing, that had sounded more sinister than intended. 

"I'm going to Mabel's next weekend," he said. "I would love it if you came with me."

There was a flash of a smile on her face, but she shook her head. "They don't want _me_ there."

"They do. Mabel is _constantly_ asking when I'm going to bring you with me."

"They're your family, though. I don't want to intrude."

Dipper exhaled through his nose. "Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Close your eyes."

She raised a brow at him, but shut her eyes anyway.

"Imagine you're on the beach. Warm sand between your toes. The ocean whispering to your ears. Oh, and, what's this? I'm bringing you a piña colada."

"You don't know how to make a piña colada."

"Yeah I do. You just... pour rum in a coconut."

"And they have coconuts on the beaches of San Francisco, do they?"

"No, I'll buy one in the supermarket. You don't have to harvest your own food, you idiot. It's the twenty-first century."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. You're ruining my immersion. What else was happening on the beach?"

"There's a seagull, shitting on your foot."

She opened her eyes and slapped his arm. "Dipper! Well, that's ruined."

"Seriously, though. Come with me. They _love_ having guests." He could picture the girls, shy at first but then running around after her, elated that there was someone new to show off to. 

"We could bring them something from the shop," Wendy said. "To repay them."

"Yeah. You could give them one of your many cats, Mabel always likes seeing those on Facebook."

"Or I could make something new. I could make _them._ All four of them."

"Even better."

"Okay," she said. "Yeah, I'll come with you."

They smiled and turned back to the stars. Dipper hadn't answered her question – did he think they would still be here, gazing up at this same patch of sky, in sixteen years' time? It seemed unlikely. But his relationship with Wendy thus far had been a string of unlikely events, ending here, as her friend, a friendship that, he thought, must have been among the most intimate of friendships on Earth. Maybe life would continue to throw the harshest obstacles their way, and they would overcome them, alone, but always gravitate back towards one another. Nothing had managed to separate them just yet.

And as Wendy's fingers glided over the cold tiled roof and intertwined with Dipper's, the future remained uncertain. Uncertain, but brighter than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's the end of that. I think I'll look back on this story as an experiment, an attempt at something a little darker than what I would usually write. I'm glad a small group of you seem to have enjoyed it! Thank you to everyone who left kudos and comments. A special thank-you to Wendipfan42, you are the BEST, reading your comments each week is a pleasure and it's especially comforting when you say positive things about a chapter that I wasn't totally fond of, after having written it. Hopefully this last chapter has at least partially repaid you for your kindness.
> 
> I will be back very soon with a short-ish Mabifica story, if you're into that kind of thing. More Wendip in the future is also a possibility, though I don't have anything planned right now. Cheers, everyone!


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